How To Answer The 2025/26 Common App Essay Prompts

As we gazed at our homemade creation, its colors dazzled our eyes.

Each fold told a story. A scene from a puzzle, pieced together, discussions and history, patterns, and art spanning from the prehistoric to modern day were being intersected to form the final answer somewhat correlated to what is asked of me: show who I am. We named it “Our Flag.”

In our staggered semi-circle seating, a moment of decision, pause, and desperation clouded us as the clock struck closer to zero. My finger hovered over each option, trembling, knowing the different consequences that will be met—public shame or public triumph. I clicked the 4th option. A green checkmark flickered across the board, and I heard the announcer’s words: “That’s Right…Flag.”

“Salaam. Namaste. Konnichiwa.” With each greeting, the circle becomes alive. The power of language awakens. Suddenly, we pass around the idea of a multi-lingual greeting. But confusion between the fact that we are building a new “language,” a universal code. Patterns and shapes. Or is it just a series of words?

In the center, “Unity in Diversity.” With each color, a region of the world is represented. A swirl of patterns, an expression of identity. The artistry, reminiscent of indigenous textiles, intricate lines, weaving stories from across continents. Patterns that once seemed random or chaotic now meld to form an unbreakable tapestry.

The day of the unveiling. The final piece is ready. The stitches have been mended. Each piece meticulously placed to represent the roots of who I am: the cultures I carry, the beliefs I hold, the languages I speak, the struggles I’ve faced, and the triumphs I’ve celebrated.

At the center stands a symbol bridging time, from ancient hieroglyphics to modern digital code. Surrounded by segments of tribal patterns, Eastern calligraphy, Western influences, Northern minimalism, and Southern vibrance. Each pattern flows into the next, a story that continues to expand.

I stand before it, arms wide open, gazing at the collage of shapes, patterns, and vibrant hues. I see my grandparents’ migration, my parents’ assimilation, and my own exploration. The threads of my identity—woven from multiple cultures, traditions, languages, and experiences—merge into one.

My flag is not a singular star or stripe. It is the interplay of diverse narratives—some hidden, some pronounced, all relevant. Within it, I find the threads of resilience, the patchwork of identity, and vulnerability turned into artistry.

These are my flags.

I am one person, yet my identity is a rich mosaic. My patterns are woven and sewn by the needle of cumin and saffron flavors, African drum beats, Western philosophies, Eastern mantras, and names under lines of code, and significant pieces of my life. However, like the stars on the American flag, my flag has changed—and can still change.

I have produced multiple versions as I tailor the pattern-less fabric to contain who I am ethnically, ideologically, and intellectually.

While my flag shows who I am, it can change—I change.

“Why do we live like this Abuelo?”

In 1979, my grandparents, with their four children, boarded an American military plane to escape the communist war in Nicaragua. Leaving with nothing, my Abuelo invested his time in rebuilding his life from the ground up in Mexico. Having been violated of his liberties, the war demonstrated to my Abuelo the importance of justice and freedom.

Either by talking with us or debating against us, my Abuelo loves to ingrain in the family a sense of free-thinking, one where we, as human beings, acknowledge the need to think critically on the laws and policies of our government. Motivating my thirst to participate, I listened intently to the arguments and rebuttals made. Instilling a curiosity for government, I was encouraged by my Abuelo to begin reading to understand such conversations and debates.

My love for reading began that day. Often reading books and later discussing them, I was introduced by my Abuelo to The Diary of Anne Frank, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Common Sense at a young age. Debating the moralities and injustices of the governments in the context of these readings, I gravitated towards enlightenment ideals of natural rights and freedoms.

I coursed through the pages of all these books, each one teaching me a new perspective of someplace in history. Digressing into the characters’ challenges and how the government of the time violated their human rights, I began to question my own government’s ability to provide justice and freedom.

In the early 2010s, a war started in Mexico by the Narco Drug Cartels for control of territory. As a result, they attacked the public in a series of terrorism to demonstrate their authority and power.

Often hearing the sound of guns and terror from my home, I witnessed the dead bodies of cartel victims hanging from overpass ledges. Their bodies missing its head were meant as a public display to intimidate the people into obedience.

Sleeping on the cold floor in case of bullets flying through my window, I laid in terror as shots were fired all through the night. Bang.... Bang.... Bang.

Under these circumstances, my rights as a Mexican national were violated by my own government’s unwillingness to protect its citizens. Understanding that my government had failed me, my fascination for natural rights and freedoms catalyzed an ambition to speak up for the principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To speak up for the rights of those who cannot. Yet, regardless of any ambitions to fight, a single word would be enough to have my family and me killed by the cartel. As a result, my pursuits for justice in Mexico were silenced by the byproducts of my limitations.

No child should have to witness terrorism in their country. No child should have to feel unsafe and unprotected in their own home. No child should have their rights violated by those who are meant to protect them.

Just like my family, I have had to move countries, leaving everything behind. Yet, the resilience and lessons of my Abuelo—from the readings and debates to the countless analytical questions—have followed my journey into the United States as my fascination to be a voice for the voiceless has continued.

Eighteen years old and understanding that the world does not function linearly, I have the passion and privilege to dedicate my life fighting for civil rights. Unlike the cartel, my fight against injustice is true power. Choosing today, tomorrow, and every day after to fight for my family, teaching me the values of freedom and justice; to fight for my childhood self, witnessing violence; to fight against the violations of human rights in a corrupt country.

I do not see my fight for civil liberties as an option but as an inevitable ending now in the Land of the Free.

My friends and I trudged through a crowded Union Station in pursuit of a typical Friday night hangout. Instead of the tourists and Amtrak commuters who usually throng the massive transportation hub, we found ourselves suddenly lost amidst a sea of students. Everywhere I turned, my eyes were met with an abundance of unfamiliar faces in school-branded apparel. Tucked under arms and rested on food court tables were signs that read “Choose Life” and “Stop Abortion Now.” And then it clicked: it was January 21st, the day of the National March for Life that we’d been warned of.

It’s not every day that you encounter such conservatism in an overwhelmingly progressive Washington, DC. Intrigued, we approached a group of them. “Where are you guys from?”

And so it began: an hour-long conversation with pro-life students from Wisconsin in the food court of Union Station. The vast majority were more than willing to sit down with us and talk about their views. The dangers of illegal abortions, Christian principles, rape-related pregnancies, corruption in foster care, and the timeline for human life were among the many topics that were touched upon in the impromptu debate.

Although we didn’t come to a resolution, I gained perspective from the interaction and was able to humanize what I’d previously simply written off as “the wrong side.” Coming from a rather politically homogeneous city, I viewed the experience as a reminder of the importance of divergent viewpoints and conversations that force you to reevaluate your beliefs.

Fallen men dotted the maple and mahogany landscape. Their commander had taken my soldiers hostage, never to see the battlefield again.

When I visited my grandfather three years ago, he introduced me to chess, frequently challenging me to play against him. To a lot of people, this may not sound exciting — it would be the equivalent of complaining “When I visited my grandparents, they made me play sudoku with them for hours on end.” But to us, chess was a form of communication. Language barriers prevented us from speaking with each other directly. And so, my grandfather and I exchanged feelings and thoughts through our glances at the board and anticipation of each other’s chess moves, opening doors to our lives that we wished to convey.

Since then, I have been fascinated with the game of chess. I stayed up late at night to play games of chess against online strangers, obsessed with the millions of openings and game theory positions there was to learn. I checked out books at my public library to learn new tactics, visited local parks to play against fellow chess enthusiasts, and created chess puzzles for my friends and me to solve throughout the day. But most importantly, I was preparing for the next time I played chess against my grandfather, eager to share smiles over the new tactics I had learned since my last visit.

Unfortunately, my grandfather recently passed away earlier this year due to organ failure. Because of the ongoing pandemic, medical professionals in his area were limited, which delayed the delivery of his treatment. I planned to visit him next summer, after graduating high school.

This past summer, I interned at a machine learning laboratory at Old Dominion University. I felt compelled to invest myself in something that would prevent the circumstances that my grandfather dealt with. In a pursuit to expand my knowledge in computational medicine, I worked tirelessly at my research internship to understand machine learning techniques, with the hope of contributing to medical research in the drug discovery process.

After months of learning about computational approaches to expedited drug discovery, I was largely frustrated with the limitations that came with these methods. The vast majority of existing research that automated processes in drug discovery did so by predicting the mechanism of action of a protein drug based on its tertiary structure, three-dimensional data that is not readily available for research settings. Knowing this, I was determined to find an alternative to using tertiary structures as input data. After reading about promising advancements in cytological profiling and drug discovery in an edition of Scientific American, I was inspired to devote a large portion of my junior year to create a machine learning project that predicted the mechanism of a drug with gene expression data, which I compiled from Stanford's Research Repository open data sources. My work was crucial in finding a more-available data alternative to tertiary structures of drugs.

Working alongside graduate students in a machine learning laboratory was a life-changing experience. My involvement at my research internship led me to qualify for ISEF, as well as earn an individual conference proceeding at the 2021 European Conference on Computational Biology, becoming the only and first individual high school student to present at the conference. But most importantly, that research gave me another opportunity to experience the joy of learning and playing chess with my grandfather. Machine learning and computational medicine rekindled my passion for consuming as much knowledge in topics as I can — the same passion I felt before when my grandfather introduced me to chess. I feel confident and challenged, ready to approach any chess position or medical research problem that faces me. Only this time, this feeling will accompany me forever, with my grandfather by my side and at the forefront of my mind, pushing me to pursue the love that he introduced me to.

That moment where the best thing that I had was the opportunity.”

Apparently, this borderline nonsensical sentence is the “optimal” hook- at least according to the generative model I coded based on a database of successful personal statements. Well, I guess I should have known better. But at the same time, I’m not surprised that I tried.

I blame my innate desire to dwell in the absolutes, wherein there is a single best way to do something. When weighing whether to follow through on a wager with my friends, I estimate the expected value of the odds; when choosing what type of cough medicine to take, I review the clinical trials; when composing one of the highest stakes writing pieces I have ever taken on, I rely on a machine to construct the “optimal” response. Unfortunately, as can be observed in my failed attempt at an opening, this style of thinking is not infallible, and its shortcomings are especially pronounced when emulating human experience.

There was a time when these situations that were unsolvable by quantitative methods struck me with unease. It’s the inherent uncertainty that comes with them. The fact that there is no binary solution to the problem- that your answer drifts in the Purgatory between correct and incorrect- from “oh what an interesting point” to “that feels very compelling”. So, I thought that maybe a few lines of code could do this for me. And when it failed, I was back to square one.

But time and time again, when faced with these challenges, my apprehension evolves into a completely different state of mind altogether. Strangely, it’s in these situations where I’m forced to stray from the absolutes that I have found the most gratification.

Sitting on the eight o’clock train, I was faced with a dilemma. I felt like the much less intelligent version of Professor X, reading the crowd, in disbelief that I’m on my way to work in a lab that specializes in analyzing mutations to figure out each and every one of these people on the genetic level. Nevertheless, whenever I dive into conversations with these strangers, I marvel at how impossible it is to truly “figure out” another person. It’s ironic that scientists can break down a person’s body into a set of A’s and C’s and T’s and G’s, but no algorithm, no matter how sophisticated, can capture who they are.

Maybe this is why, when it comes to people, I can never find an absolute answer. Human interaction is defined by the gray area, the uncertainty. In a way, it is the ultimate unsolvable problem. Cracking it has turned into a task that I cannot stay away from.

With that said, I do not believe that I’m looking for an actual solution. The process of building relationships and getting to know the people behind the numbers is dynamic, exciting, and intriguing- a source of gratification that cannot be fulfilled any other way.

A part of me relishes in the comfort that comes with finding the indisputably correct answer and knowing exactly what the next is going to be. But it’s precisely this reason that they can never replace the electrifying feeling that comes with dealing with something as unpredictable as people.

The other part of me craves to see and talk to people every single day: whether it’s engaging in spirited debates with my friends, facing down opponents on the football field, or conversing with co-workers and clients. Here, there is no structure, pattern, or need to worry about having exactly the right answer. One simply just reacts; it’s both refreshing and exhilarating.

So, I really should have known better- my thought process cannot be reduced to a series of undulating functions and networks that converge into a single expression that can draw you into my essay. And personally, I do not think that it ever can be.

It’s a game for the most cutthroat of spirits. Be vigilant. Be mindful of your adversaries’ vocabulary. Know their strengths but, most importantly, know their linguistic weaknesses. Don’t be charitable to your competitors, no matter their age. Above all, maintain a vacant countenance; you cannot let your rivals know your next move. Play dumb when your supercilious opponent of a father thinks he has caught you in the jaws of “b-u-c-o–”; but let’s be honest, you’re no foreigner to rustic jargon.

The name of the game is “Ghost.” The rules are deceptively simple: each turn, players will offer a letter to ultimately form a word. There are two caveats, however: if the word ends on a player’s turn or if a player doesn’t know the word in question, they lose the round.

I’ve been playing “Ghost” with my father since second grade, a time when his vocabulary was disproportionately larger than mine, making the game infuriatingly unfair and rather unappealing. The colossal vocabulary of a near fifty-year-old man, whose game strategy was replete with affectations aimed to belittle me, trounced the vocabulary of my seven-year-old self. But I was never one to sit idly when faced with a challenge. I wished to extinguish my dad’s undefeated “Ghost” record. And so, I studied. I read. I thrust my nose into the thesaurus. De die in diem, I perused law documents, absorbing legal jargon and latin terms. I commit word after word to memory, a tedious yet satisfying demonstration of my competitive morale.

I eventually systematized this word-learning crusade. During my freshman year, “Build Your Vocabulary” was born, an empirical experiment of sorts. It was my personal dictionary, an eighty-page, margin-reduced testament to my industrious resolve. Ambitious and impetuous, I spent countless hours retaining the dictionary entries of bucolic, antediluvian, internecine, and on. As the matches of “Ghost” continued (and as my losses became more infrequent), I began seeing words transcend the realm of the game and my document.

The more I read, the more I saw these once sterile words, used as mere ammunition to beat my father in “Ghost,” inherit a pulse of their own. The prose in books I read gave momentum to otherwise vapid dictionary entries. Reading the word bucolic, an old friend that had endured in my mind as a mere definition, embedded into Virginia Woolf’s writing, or antediluvian engineered into Jack London’s political pontifications, or internecine woven into the dialogue of Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novels was, frankly, enlightening – a sublime awakening to the potential of language.

These isolated words, thrown together into a single document, were mere bricks – building blocks to a potential masterpiece. Over time, I learned to stack these bricks; I erected vividly imagined houses and eventually constructed kingdoms of mesmerizing streams of consciousness. Words that were once trivial dictionary entries, indistinct, undeveloped, and divorced from a much-need succession of elegant prose, became nuanced tools utilized in the vibrant mosaic of language.

What started as a vindictive flame, an infernal desire to win a game of “Ghost” against my dad, planted the seed, as luck would have it, of a newfound comprehension of literature. Writing is a skill with immeasurable power, a power that can fashion abstract universes and craft innovative plots. With each word I learn and book I read, I make sense of the eternal welter of knowledge that lodges in the great, incorporeal web of writing.

There was a time when winning a game of “Ghost” against my dad was a Sisyphean endeavor; I hadn’t a chance. After years of assembling a personal dictionary and embarking on ceaseless reading sprees, I am not only an improved writer but a more formidable opponent. All those legal phrases, all those words, have led me here: when it comes to the game of “Ghost,” my dad and I are on equal footing – or as my ninth-grade self would say, pari passu.