Note: The below essays were not edited by EssayEdge Editors. They appear as they were initially reviewed by admissions officers.

I felt like a cadet at West Point that first week of fifth grade. Mrs. Stith was our sergeant, commanding us to “stand at attention,” “walk single file,” “keep heads up” and “speak only when spoken to.” We had only two rules to obey in her classroom: never talk while Mrs. Stith is talking, and do your homework! We did not dare break these rules, fearing an arduous obstacle course to climb as our consequence—or perhaps a firing squad awaiting Mrs. Stith’s command to release an arsenal of bullets into our bodies.

My fifth-grade mind was not accustomed to such a demanding teacher. Coloring outside the lines, reading The Great Adventures of Encyclopedia Brown and building mobiles with construction paper had been the norm. My mouth gaped at the sight of endless reading packets and workbook pages. I was in boot camp now, and Mrs. Stith was going to toughen up the troops. Mrs. Stith could see our agony, our pleading eyes hoping she would blow her whistle and let us take a break from the work. But she yelled at the class at any sign of softness. Twenty pages of reading every night kept our stamina up. I cried at the thought of learning how to spell “dictionary,” “miserable” and “criminal.” I sweated over decimals. How could I learn all this and still have time to watch Cosby? This wasn’t a youngster’s usual anxiety. I honestly thought I hated Mrs. Stith, or “Mrs. Stiff,” as we called her, snickering as we pictured our gray-haired tyrant being lowered into a tomb. Who did this old woman think she was anyway, always barking at the class? I had always been the teacher’s pet. “Is my work not good enough?” I wondered. How could she destroy my confidence so easily?

“Carrie, how could you get this question wrong?”

“I . . . I . . . don’t know,” I managed, lowering my head in shame, unable to look at Mrs. Stith’s disappointed face.

“Don’t you know what a preposition is?”

“Yes, Mrs. Stith,” I replied, knowing that this blunder meant K.P. duty. I would have to study my composition book a little extra tonight.

I can’t pinpoint exactly why, but sometime during those first few weeks I decided to study hard and make Mrs. Stith proud of me. Maybe I dreamed of following in my older brother’s prominent footsteps (sometimes I thought they were left by Bigfoot). I wanted to be as studious and intelligent as Christopher. I couldn’t destroy the name that my brother and I had established. Mediocrity wasn’t part of my vocabulary. I had always been the best in class, favored by my teachers and often chosen to read aloud or go to the chalkboard to do multiplication tables. The difference was that now it didn’t come so easily. I would have to work.

Two-page reports turned into detailed posters explaining the formation of igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary rocks. Mrs. Stith noticed her students’ best efforts and rewarded us for hard work with smelly stickers. We loved those stickers and hung them on the wall. One could easily discern my long trail of grapes, strawberries and apples. Reading packets became enjoyable. I left the world of Ramona Quimby and discovered Miss Havisham’s mansion, the plummeting guillotine and Jacob Marley’s rattling chains. That year marked the beginning of my battle with the nerd syndrome.

Fifth grade helped establish my reputation as a brain. I would skip recess and stay after school just to talk with Mrs. Stith. I would spend hours every night studying beyond the assigned homework. I didn’t mind if other kids laughed at me for being studious; they just hadn’t met the real Mrs. Stith. I no longer saw her as a rigid drill sergeant; now she was a helpful platoon leader. For my part, I was no longer a raw recruit but well on my way to becoming a skilled soldier.

What once were tears of fright and frustration turned to tears of sorrow when I graduated from fifth grade. For graduation Mrs. Stith gave me a special gift—a copy of A Day No Pigs Would Die. She wrote on the back cover: “I loved this book. I hope you will too. You are an outstanding girl. Best of luck always. Love, Mrs. Stith.” Mrs. Stith retired that year and I never saw my friend again.

This essay grips the reader from the outset, as the writer employs a simile in the opening statement to make her point: “I felt like a cadet at West Point that first week of fifth grade.” The writer does a good job of sprinkling that image throughout the essay, providing thematic coherence. The conflict posed is one of challenge: a tough teacher who expects more from her students than they have been used to. What is most effective is the language the writer uses, showing the reader exactly how she felt at that young age: “My mouth gaped at the sight of endless reading packets and workbook pages.”

The applicant can be categorized as an “overachiever” (“I had always been the teacher’s pet.”) who also feels she must push himself based upon his brother’s past scholastic successes. Mrs. Stith, however, challenges this overachiever to push herself even harder: “I wanted to be as studious and intelligent as Christopher.” The writer employs a skilled transition between Paragraphs 8 and 9 (“That year marked the beginning of my battle with the nerd syndrome. Fifth grade helped establish my reputation as a brain.”). The resolution is expected, with the student rising to his teacher’s challenge, but the success in this piece lies in the execution—not the originality of the topic.

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I keep remembering odd things: the way she loved daffodils, her delight at the antics of our dog, jokes she told at the dinner table, her subtle brand of feminism, the look in her eyes when she talked about my future. I knew about college before I’d ever heard of high school; I was Mom’s second chance at the degree she never had.

Her parents pushed her too much, too hard, too fast, and she always wished she hadn’t let the pressure overwhelm her. She dropped out of college after one semester for marriage and a secretarial job. While she never regretted marrying my father, she always regretted giving up her dream of becoming an accountant. She was determined her eldest daughter would never miss an opportunity, and she missed out on so many herself so I could succeed.

She was the one person I could talk to about anything: politics, dating, parties, failed tests, or nail polish. She was right about so much, so often—much more than I gave her credit for at the time. We never did agree on clothes. She favored the J. Crew look, I kept trying for (and failing at) the neo-sixties style. One year we didn’t buy any new clothes at all in a battle of wills: she refused to buy anything that didn’t “fit me properly” and I refused to wear anything with an alligator on it.

She loved the holidays, Christmas most of all. One of the most intensely special times of my life was Christmas my sophomore year, when I played Tiny Tim in a local community theater production of “A Christmas Carol.” Mom delighted in my endless rehearsal stories and spent hours helping me work out ways of disguising my long hair. There’s a line in the show: “And it was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.” Change the pronouns and that quote describes Mom perfectly.

I never imagined she wouldn’t be here now, micro-managing, debating the merits of such-and-such college with me, chasing the dog around the living room, ruining spaghetti, explaining “power colors,” and relishing exciting changes in IRS forms. I never thought cancer could strike so quickly, could kill someone so strong and determined in only a year.

She’s the one person I couldn’t imagine living without; now, since last January, I’ve had to. Suddenly, I have no one to talk to about meaningless little things, no one whose advice I trust implicitly to help me with decisions. When I come home from school, I come home to an empty house, haunted by memories of the year she spent here dying. I remember the disastrous Thanksgiving when she was nauseous and delusional, our wonderful last Christmas Eve together, the tangle of tubes in the family room, the needlepoint picture of Rainbow Row she labored over while stuck in bed, and the bags of M&Ms she always kept within reach.

What I feel cheated of is the future we’ll never have.

Writing about the death of a parent is one of the most difficult things an applicant could choose to do. This student took on the challenge and, as a result, produced a terrific essay. The piece is very positive at first, relating vivid, precise, intimate details of the student’s life with her mother. Though some of the details may seem mundane, they provide the reader with much insight into the girl, her mother, and her mother’s influence upon her.

The piece surprises the reader—just as the tragic event shocked the writer—at the end of the penultimate paragraph when the student states: “I never thought cancer could strike so quickly, could kill someone so strong and determined in only a year.” The major concern is that the essay becomes too negative in the conclusion, focusing on how the applicant feels “cheated” by the painful loss of her mother. However, the reader understands how incredibly difficult it must have been for this girl to write such an essay and is impressed by her maturity.

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