37 Johns Hopkins University Essay Examples

Prompt: Founded in the spirit of exploration and discovery, Johns Hopkins University encourages students to share their perspectives, develop their interests, and pursue new experiences. Use this space to share something you’d like the admissions committee to know about you (your interests, your background, your identity, or your community), and how it has shaped what you want to get out of your college experience at Hopkins. (300-400 words)

Picture a bakery. It’s quaint, comprising an array of scents that each smell promising, but altogether create a lovely bakery aroma. Outside of the overall bakery scent, there’s one particular item that demands our attention, allowing us to appreciate the same idea for different reasons. Imagine me as that bakery with different sweets. The pies on the counter are my Ghanaian heritage, the rolls my academic ambition, the quiches my Catholicism, and the cake with a glossy finish right in the center, my military child status. The hardest part of being a military child, unsurprisingly, is moving; the younger you are, the harder it seems. Nights were spent in tears, tears that mourned life before the move, and tears that quivered at the idea of meeting new people. Sadly, by sixth grade, I decided that completely changing who I was to fit in was easier than adapting. I remember crying to my mother begging for the latest items that everyone else had and trying my best to adopt the local vernacular so I’d be told I was the “whitest black person they’d ever met.” Alas, there’s a reason we don’t make our major life decisions at twelve. Around seventh grade, I stopped forcing myself to change. My mindset transformed from “constantly having to restart my life” to “getting the chance to see a new part of the world.” I stopped envying others and allowed myself to become the amalgam of every state, school, and neighborhood because, ultimately, that’s what I was. My personality was different; it shined brightest among the different variations of myself I had crafted to fit other people’s pleasures. I started embracing change instead of loathing it. I use this status as an advantage. Being a military child taught me that conformity is worthless compared to individuality, and change is a gateway to opportunity. It brought me a personalized birthday note from Obama and even took me to Hopkins for the very first time. While stationed in Fort Meade, my family lived near Hopkins, and though I was only eight, I’ll never forget how stunned I was by the school. Regardless of who I was, Hopkins welcomed me, so even though I no longer live in the area, I consider Hopkins home. So, should my bakery be given the opportunity to join Hopkins’ neighborhood, it’ll never fail to provide that lovely bakery aroma.