Edits/suggestions for both would be much appreciated!
UVA supplement: "Describe your favorite place to get lost." 250 limit - this is 297 (how much over should I be okay with submitting?)
Sitting alone at a dark stoplight following rehearsal, I begin to tap my foot to the pulsing beats. Soon, my head follows, bobbing left and right, and before I can think to stop myself, I'm belting the lyrics to a World Gym sign. "WHAT IS LOVE?" I ask it, in what could only loosely be called singing. "BABY, DON'T HURT ME." The light turns green. I briefly consider halting my jam session but decide against it, continuing unashamedly. Here, with no one but strangers as my witness, there's no pressure to be the person I strive to be, no need to live up to expectations. I can do whatever I please, a rare and welcome simplicity. The moment is electric, humming with possibility, and I'm blissfully lost in it.
It was a long and stressful journey, arriving at this point. I endured the dull Driver's Ed class with its painfully cheesy 80's videos, tolerated the incompetent instructor and his omnipresent Doritoes, withstood my paranoid mother and her white-knuckled fingers all in hopes that it would be worth it. And it was. For on that victorious day when I passed my driver's test, I first experienced the sweetness of possibility. Granted, I was only driving to the library, but it was the taste of the freedom, the potential of the moment, that became so remarkably addictive. I could listen to rap without my mother's glares. Argue with myself and not worry about being right or wrong. Sing without worrying about pitch. In my little white sedan, I found an escape from the pressures to do things a certain way, and found the joy in doing them my way. Whether ingenious or ridiculous, the ideas were dizzyingly infinite, and I had only just started on the road to discovery.
Common App Activities Statement
I grew up in a horse family, but I was never a horse person. But when I joined the summer program at Progressive Equestrian Therapeutic Services (PETS), I became one. Every week the summer after my junior year, I made the long voyage to the PETS facility, where I volunteered with other "horse people" to help give riding lessons to children with physical and mental disabilities. Terms like" two-point" and "snaffle bit" so casually thrown around my house gained meaning as I learned the basics of riding along with the students. My mother's weekend exhaustion made sense as I too spent hours cleaning stalls in the summer heat, discovering it was possible to sweat from one's eyelids. But most importantly, I learned to understand what my mother and sister always found in riding as I saw the joy radiating from the students' glowing faces. At PETS, they thrived, escaping the challenges of their disabilities as they progressed in a new arena, and I was ecstatic to be a part of their journeys.
If you really want to make the 250 limit there are a couple things you could take out.
"no pressure to be the person I strive to be" -- you could take this out and leave the bit about expectations, and it would still get your point across.
"the potential of the moment"
Also try to go back and re-word some of the sentences into shorter descriptions.
"I'm belting the lyrics to a World Gym sign." --That should be song.
"I could listen to rap without my mother's glares. Argue with myself and not worry about being right or wrong. Sing without worrying about pitch." --I think you can combine this and possible re-word it to make it shorter.
As for the second one, instead of "I learned to understand", I think it would sound better as: I finally understood...
In the last sentence the "they" is kind of vague.
I think the rest of it is really good.
I recommend abiding by the word maximum they establish within the criteria for the answer. The topic of word maximums is one I frequently ponder and question admissions counselors with at every given opportunity, and from what I've gathered they possess a nearly uniform stance on the topic. These essay prompts are in a sense your first assignments of the respective institutions to which you're applying. Don't submit anything on these applications you wouldn't be absolutely comfortable submitting for a graded in-class assignment. Don't provide these schools any reasonable ground upon which they may knock your application. 250 means 250. Read it over, revise it, cut it down and repeat. You'll get there, and I think you'll find that through the refining process your response becomes increasingly focused and better reading overall.
