Why Carnegie Mellon? (Communication Design)

Growing up, my parents always encouraged me to try different extra-curricular activities. Soccer, swimming, and dance lessons were all things I enjoyed, but never developed a passion for. Throughout elementary, middle, and high school, I'd always known I liked art. But I never took it up until my sophomore year of high school. Starting out drawing and painting letters, I immersed myself in the world of typography. Then after discovering Photoshop and teaching myself to vector my type in Illustrator, I became to be interested in the computer-based aspects of graphic design. I religiously followed multiple design and inspiration blogs, learning by imitation and YouTube tutorials. Later on, a friend requested I try to build a website for his music project. Not knowing any HTML or CSS, I dove into the project of figuring it all out. I studied and practiced. And I found out that coding was just like learning a foreign language. Though my passion is newfound and my learning untraditional, there's nothing I love doing as much as tweaking letters so they fit perfectly together, writing codes to make a functional and visually pleasing website, and creating a balanced composition within my works. I see graphic design as the consistent understanding of a product by an audience through the manipulation of type, color, and placement. As I've discovered, graphic design is a combination of all the things I'm interested in which is why I've chosen to pursue it as a major.

My journey through design has only just begun. I believe that Carnegie Mellon, with its outstanding ranking and reputation for its Communication Design program, can assist me in reaching my goal of being a successful designer. Therefore, my passion for design has induced me to apply to Carnegie Mellon in the College of Fine Arts. Being self-taught, I have faith that Carnegie Mellon could provide me with a well-rounded education and a superb foundation for the skills that I'd need in order to be a flourishing designer.

Along with such an appealing design program, I'd also be interested in Computer Sciences as a minor. As I've heard, Carnegie Mellon upholds a great name for their Computer Sciences program. Being in interested website production, I believe that the skills of both web design and web development are important in creating attractive, purposeful, and efficient websites.

In addition to my interest in both of my intended major and minor, I've learned that Carnegie Mellon has a great collaboration program between the different schools within the university. I find this so appealing because I value a sense of community, which also gives great insight into other programs and things happening on campus. A sense of community also pushes students to learn to work together and I know I'll enjoy an interdisciplinary and collaborative environment that Carnegie Mellon provides.

Through its productive and integrated community and a world-renowned design program, I firmly believe that studying at Carnegie Mellon can endow me with an infinite amount of opportunities; reaching my goal of becoming a versatile designer, learning from and networking with talented professors and alumni, contributing to campus life, and finding my learning haven and a home away from California.

Please help me critique! I need this for tomorrow.

Try to break up your first paragraph to and create the introduction. It's too long compared to the others.
I suggest that you should briefly explain how you know about Carnegie Mellon before explaining why you decide to apply.

.... I know you may be having a word count limit.... But these words are important to be included as this is the opening of your answer. Let's try to cut down from some other part : D


Also I always liked art, but took it up seriously only in my sophomore year in high school..... managed to save you some words :D

It's good to have your prompt around to give a more relevant feedback :D
Good Luck!