Speaker 1: Hi guys, my name is Brie. Welcome back to my channel. If you are a returning subscriber, welcome to my channel if you're a new subscriber. As you can see from the title, today I'm going to be doing a more of school or college related type video. Just a disclaimer, I do not really plan on making any more school or college videos because I did decide to defer my admission to the college that I chose to go to for next year so I actually will be taking a gap year so I'm not really going to be making any college content anytime soon. I just wanted to let you guys know that. I just thought I would share my essay because I feel like it's something that I'm really proud of and something that a lot of people don't realize is a very important part of the application process and sometimes it can make or break if you get into the school or not and it can sometimes be the one thing that makes the admissions counselors choose one student over another regardless of like GPA or extracurriculars. your essay is a very important part of your application. So I decided to share my essay with you guys because I remember when I was a sophomore and a junior in high school looking up these videos trying to get some inspiration as to what to write my essay about or how to write my essay because I know that essay can be a scary thing to take on and it can take a lot of time and be very hard to write. This essay took me a very long time to write. I started first working on my college applications when I was, it was my sophomore year right before I was about to go into junior year is when I started to get more serious about college but it probably took me about five months to actually write it because a large part of it was me trying to find out exactly what I wanted to write about and also I just it just I kind of kept procrastinating because I'm one of the type of people that's like if I have something that I'm stressed out about or something that like I don't know just something that bothers me I just kind of like try to avoid it but that is something that I'm trying to unlearn and I'm trying to learn to take life head on you know what I mean. But I will be giving you guys a few tips on how to come up with an essay topic and how to write your essay because like I said I know this can be a very tricky thing and it can be very stressful. So I'm going to go ahead and read off a list to all of the schools that I was academically accepted to. I was accepted to East Carolina University. I think I received a scholarship from here too but it wasn't like a super big one but I did receive a scholarship. Kent State University, Marymount Manhattan College, which I also received two different scholarships from this school, Montclair State University, Ohio Northern University, which I also received a pretty really big scholarship from here. I received $65,000 I think or $64,000 it was. It was $16,000 a year is what they gave me, which would have probably left me with about maybe around a few thousand dollars to actually pay for tuition each year, which I was extremely grateful for but like I said I did end up having to turn down the offer because I did defer my admission and also I just that's not really one of the schools I actually wanted to go to like I'm appreciative for the scholarship but that's not where I really wanted to go. Ohio University I think I received a scholarship from here too I think it was a small one. Point Park University University of Cincinnati, University of North Carolina Greensboro, Western Michigan University which I also received a pretty decent scholarship from here as well, and Wright State University, which I received a scholarship from here as well, but it was not really a big scholarship, but I'm still grateful for anything. So without further ado, let me go ahead and get into the essay that got me into all the colleges that I just listed. So the prompt that I chose was, discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others. Growing up, questions like who are you and what sets you aside from others were always the hardest ones to answer. In my mind, I felt as if it was almost impossible to be unique in such a big world, which is why I never really knew how to answer this question. It wasn't until I entered the college application process that I began to ponder this question again. As I thought deeply about it, I confronted a repressed memory, a memory of a story my grandmother had told me about the origin of my last name, the one unique thing about myself that I hated the most. One of my great grandfathers, Levar, was an enslaved man that managed to escape from slavery after fighting in the American Civil War. After becoming a free man, he knew that he wanted to reclaim the power that was once stripped from our ancestors. He no longer wanted the constant reminder of oppression, genocide, and generational pain attached to his identity. He decided to change his last name from the name that was assigned by his slave master. When he opened his eyes on this first day of freedom, the first thing he saw was a rug, a muddy, worn-out rug, but it was his. Levi Ruggs is what he decided to call himself. This last name has trickled down into my family tree for over 150 years. It was given to my grandfather, my father, and now me. Is it possible that my great-grandfather purposely chose a name that he knew would give his descendants a unique and powerful addition to their character? Have I betrayed my grandfather by hiding this part of who I am? Would he want me feeling ashamed when people made fun of it? Or would he want me to stand confidently and pass down this legacy he created to my own children? The more I thought about his intention, the more inspired and uplifted I began to feel. I no longer felt the shame and humiliation that I'd once felt before. I began to feel proud that I didn't have a symbol of hatred, trauma, and unthinkable doings weighing down my identity. I was free of the shackles that were once forcibly attached onto the spirits of my ancestors, and for that I am forever grateful. I have learned to embrace a part of myself that for a long time I had felt was unworthy of being embraced. I no longer feel that I have to hide a part of myself to fit in with the rest of society, now I understand that uniqueness is meant to set you aside from everyone else. So now when people ask me who I am, I say I am proud, confident, and artistic. I am a modern-day symbol of the perseverance and hope of my ancestors. I am a powerful black woman with caramel skin and perfect kinky curls. But most importantly, I say I am Brielle Ruggs. Now, tell me I didn't eat that up. Tell me I did not eat that up. Tell me. Like, y'all don't even understand, I am so proud of that essay because it was like it took me so long to write that and like part of me was kind of upset with myself for deferring my admission because I'm like how the fuck am I gonna top this essay like you don't even know how long. So that was my essay um so now I'm just gonna get into the tips I have for you guys. The first tip that I want to speak on is um I feel like when you're choosing a personal essay you should choose something that is not already in your application um a personal essay is really kind of meant to give the admissions counselor a little bit of more insight as to who you are as a person so if you have on your application that you did track and you were like the best runner on your track team and all this and you won all these medals and stuff I wouldn't necessarily think that it would be the best idea to write my personal essay about track because the admissions counselors already know that you like track Now if you have like a unique story as to why you started doing track or some type of unique story or something that made it like different than just a regular story about you doing track, then maybe I would say that that would be a good idea. When you're thinking about an essay you kind of want to think out the box and do something that a lot of people haven't really done before. Because the admissions counselors are seeing hundreds and hundreds of essays every day and I can guarantee you that a lot of the essays probably sound a lot like of the same thing and when admissions counselors finally get an essay that is like different than what they're usually used to seeing it will probably make them more lenient to accept you. There's been a lot of times where admissions counselors have said that they have chosen students with lower GPAs over like scholar students just because of the essay. Essays can play a huge part in getting scholarships and getting into schools especially if you do not have the best grades or maybe not the best test scores or just maybe you know you didn't really do that much in high school maybe you just kind of went to high school and just did whatever but now you decided that you want to go to college your essay can really help you. Like I said show the admissions counselors who you really are as a person and not just you know your grades or your SAT scores and stuff like that. Another tip that I have on writing essays is to make sure that your essay is about you because this seems to happen with a lot of people's essays. I wrote my essay about like my grandfather my great-grandfather had um was an enslaved man and he changed his last name to Ruggs. Well I didn't make the entire essay about him I made it about me too because I made sure to talk about how it made me feel and how it helped me grow as a person but if I were to only talk about how he changed his last name and I didn't give more insight to as to how it helped me grow it would have been like he was the main character and at that point I would have been kind of making the essay about him and not about me. So you want to make sure that you're making the essay about you. Another example of that is like why NYU essay they talk about oh my god I love New York so much you know I want to go to NYU because I want to live in New York and New York is cool and all this stuff but it's like you're supposed to be talking about why you want to go to NYU make it about NYU not about New York you know what I'm saying like make it about you and why you want to go to NYU not because of New York so I hope that makes sense. Another tip that I have for essays is to make your essay kind of how do I how do I phrase this make it kind of focus on a specific moment or a specific part of your life. Make it kind of like an inner monologue. With my essay I talked about the moment where I realized how important it was to have a different last name than everybody else. You know I talked about how it made me feel and you know what what I thought his intentions were with doing that. I'm talking about a specific moment and how it made me feel. That can give the story a more of a clear direction but I feel like if you write it more like an inner monologue it makes it a lot more powerful and it makes it sound more like a story more than an essay and that's also something that I want to say make it think of a personal story or instead of personal essay because a lot of people hear the word essay and they think they need to like write in this formal tone and they need to use all these big words but it's not even about that just make it more of like a story you know keep the reader or the admissions counselor interested from the beginning of the essay. I can guarantee that there's probably some admissions counselors that have read like a few lines of essays and were not interested and just threw them to the side because they just didn't they weren't interested so they knew that they just wouldn't want to read that. That's pretty much it as far as tips um I think that's all that I had to say. Yeah that was the essay that got me into all the colleges that I applied to. I hope this video was of use or helped any of you guys um because I know how difficult it can be to be going through this process especially like if you're a first generation student and you don't have anyone else to help you with like college stuff because you know you may not really know anyone. I understand that and you know I'm always available you know through DM or comments if you guys have any questions that you would like to ask about the college application process. If you like this video make sure you go ahead and leave a thumbs up, make sure you go ahead and subscribe and leave any comments for any suggestions of other videos that you would like to see on my channel. Thank you guys so much for watching and I'll see you guys in the next video. Bye.