To Pursue Dreams :: Graduate Admissions Essays

To Pursue Dreams   I was born and raised in a rural community in the Appalachian Mountains. Most of the local people work at farms, factories, or mills. Education is not deemed odiously important, since even a high school education is of little unimaginative value. My mom dropped off of high school because she was pregnant, and has been a factory dressmaker for fifty years. My get dropped out after 8th grade because his avouch bewilder ran out on his family, leaving him to have to work. He has been a welder in a steel mill my whole brio. They expected that my scholastic career would be roughly similar to theirs. My own goals, however, were much higher(prenominal) I wanted to go to college -- and not just any college. I wanted to go to a really good matchless. I thought process that a higher education was my ticket to a better life than my parents had, and so I focused on college with a driven passion.   My dreaming schools included the University of Pennsylvani a, Northwestern, Dartmouth, and Brown. I made lists and charts, and papered the walls of my room with pictures and statistics of these four institutions. The evening I received my SAT score (1300), my parents came home from work and I ran out to tell them that I might be able to get into one of my top choices for college. Though my head was in the clouds, my parents had their feet very firmly put on the ground. They asked me if I knew what kind of kids went to those schools. Hesitating, I said, ...not really. My mother explained how the kids who went to those schools were wealthy and well-educated, with scads of connections that would help them get into college. She told me that I was neither rich nor terribly smart, and therefore should consider schools that were more my speed.   I got applications for UNC-Chapel Hill, Wake Forest, and UNC-Asheville the next day. My father looked only at the UNC-Asheville booklet and said that it looked nice. My mother agreed, saying that I had finally chosen one school that I possibly could go steady in reality. My mother wouldnt even read the application booklet for Penn. My father snorted angrily if I so much as mentioned Northwestern. I was crushed. I began to wonder if my dream schools were just that a fanciful dream.