Colgate Supplement - 3 word description - "bold, humble and happy" (250 W or less)

We want to get to know you better. What are three words that your best friend would use to describe you and why?

bold, humble and happy

When I asked my best friends what three words they would use to describe me, they replied with "bold, humble and happy." Reflecting back on my experiences, I realized that all three words were accurate descriptions of myself.

My interest in politics has allowed me to showcase my boldness. Along with a fascination with current events, I found myself surrounded by numerous societal issues such as abortion and assisted suicide. These issues are controversial, but I never feared talking about them. Instead, I was curious about what others had to say. This led to heated debate, which I always enjoyed.

Throughout high school, I never used my GPA as a way to compare intelligence with my peers, which has always been something that my parents preached to me at home. I am humble, and I know that I am not better than anybody else. I also enjoy asking others for help, especially in science, which is my weakest subject.

Lastly, I am a frequently-happy person, usually waving at the students across the campus and singing Spanish songs on the way to class even though I have no idea what I'm saying. I am a lover of puns and I tend to take every chance I can get to create a pun even if my friends think that they aren't funny. I tend to be a very happy-go-lucky and carefree person. At Colgate, I hope to bring the same boldness to my ideas and also bring laughter to the Colgate community.

Rowlie, there are a number of problems with your response. The first is that you refer to "best friends", which is plural, when the prompt says "best friend", singular. So a simple change of reference will fix that problem. The three word description of how this person would describe you is acceptable. However, you failed to explain these character references in terms of why your friend describes you in that manner. The explanation must not come from a self reflection but rather, the way that this person came to know you and became your best friend. Don't use this essay to showcase how highly you think of yourself. It should instead, be reflective of why your best friend would think so highly of you, outside of what you think about yourself. That is why your essay is supposed to explain. Allow the reviewer to get to know you from the POV of your best friend. So you can approach this essay as an interview in order to help you give an opening to the thoughts of your friend about you. That is what this prompt expects you to provide.

Holt, I've rewritten the essay entirely and asked again for new descriptions and this is what I got so far: (It's exactly 250 words)

My best friend who I went to school with since the third grade would describe me as "loud, expressive and analytical." Every day in school, I would be the student laughing on a pun that someone said or a joke even when they aren't funny. She recurrently tells me I'm a weird child and often asks me, "Why are you so loud?" With the rise of her eyebrow, I often stop but will return to my loud self in several minutes. However, she says that she admires my sense of expression that I incorporate with my loudness. I later discovered that my expression is not limited to my loudness as I was able to show my expressiveness in leadership, with my best friend. With my best friend, I became the Hawai'i State Student Council representative while she became Student Body Government president, with the hopes of fixing problems in our school. Even though I'm a representative for state council, she was very accepting of my ideas and trusted my instinct in planning school events such as spirit week and homecoming. In addition, she also describes me as very analytical. When writing her college application essays, I was usually the first person she allows to proofread essays as I have established myself as a grammar police. Lastly, she frequently recalls my inability to comprehend simple jokes as I would often over-analyze what certain jokes mean before I find it funny.