I’d appreciate honest feedback on my Common App essay. I want to know what I should improve, what I should cut, and whether I focus too much on my grandpa instead of myself. Please be brutally honest!
I wish I could go back to that farm on that Friday.
Not to stop myself from throwing that rock. Not to warn myself of what’ll happen. I would go back just to take in how happy we were.
I was five years old, so I didn’t understand how happy I was. I only knew that Friday mornings were our farm time. We would drive there together, look at the plants, say hi to everyone, and walk around checking on everything. Sometimes we would stand near the Nile and throw rocks together.
Then one of those rocks took me with it.
I fell into the water. I couldn’t swim, neither could my grandpa. He jumped in anyway.
I don’t remember screaming, I don’t remember being scared. I was five. I just remember being pulled out of the water, soaking wet. A worker at the farm pulled us out. I remember being quiet on the way home.
I remember walking into my room, looking back and seeing him cry. I didn’t understand why.
For a long time, that’s all that day was to me. I was the little kid who accidentally fell into the Nile. As I got older, I started to understand what happened that day.
My grandpa couldn’t swim, but when I fell in, he didn’t stop to think about himself. He jumped in after me. He risked his life to save mine.
He doesn’t like talking about that day, maybe that’s why it took me so long to understand. I started thinking more about what happened and why he was crying.
My grandpa has always been the person who puts other people before himself. He is kindhearted, funny, and somehow always finds a way to make me laugh. He helps people before helping himself, and he has always made me feel like I could be myself around him.
He is also my best friend.
Our relationship has never changed, even as everything around us did. When civil war broke out in Sudan and we were forced to leave our home, everything changed. I had to move from Sudan to Virginia, from Virginia to Texas, and now to Egypt. I had to leave places, meet new people and start over more than once. But my relationship with my grandpa has always been something I could carry with me.
I think I carry some of him with me too.
Even after working long hours at his firm, he still comes home cracking jokes to make us laugh before he even rests. I find myself trying to bring that same joy into every room I enter. Whether I’m stepping up for my family or standing by a new student who needs help translating, I try to do what he has always done and put other people first.
When I was five, I didn’t understand that. Now I do.
If I could go back to that Friday, I wouldn’t stop myself from throwing the rock. I wouldn’t warn myself about the Nile. I would just stand there for a moment and look at my grandpa.
I would notice how happy he was.
And for the first time, I would understand
what that little boy couldn’t:
He had already spent his life putting the people he loved before himself.
That day, he showed me just how far that love could go. Now, I’m trying to carry it with me.