If someone asked you, “Who are you?,” what would your first response be? When I started my journey of writing my college essay, describing who I was as a person and what represents my identity, I recalled staring at my empty Google document for minutes. At this moment I realized I didn’t truly understand who I was as a person, and what made it worse was that I had to write it down in a wordy essay. Critics may argue that a person’s age determines their mentality, but I would have to disagree with this statement. In the short article “Developing Adolescent Identity,” Joanna Williams stresses the idea that young people’s ideas can change over time due to the environment or social norms. Although, the real reason why I couldn’t tell who I was as a person was because I didn’t have many experiences that would completely shape who I am at this point in my life. One’s age does not deem them as an adult or mature, because of challenges we may encounter and the environment we may be in. In some cases, my mentality may not be as mature as someone who’s the same age as me or younger, because they may have gone through challenges that would make them more mature than me or other young adults. Writing the college essay comes with stress, because of the pressure to know who you are and what you want to do at 17 and 18 years old.

Since there were no ideas that I could think about that shaped my identity, I wrote about my background of being African American with a full Jamaican family. I described my experiences coming from Brooklyn, New York, in a mostly Jamaican neighborhood to moving to Queens in a mostly Indian neighborhood and school. I explained how this impacted me due to how different our cultures were. To be honest, it didn’t make much of an impact on me, and I hated that essay because I knew I wasn’t being honest with myself. After I was done with that terrible essay, I wanted opinions from adults that were around me who I knew wouldn’t like it. They knew that I wasn’t proud of my essay, and that I didn’t reflect on who I am. Eventually, I scrapped my entire essay and reflected upon myself for about three to four days. I watched almost every video on YouTube that you could think of so that I could gain inspiration on what to write. I encountered some of the most depressing college essays and explanations of how these experiences shaped them as a person. They talked about how their essays got them accepted to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. I thought to myself, how could I ever create a great college essay if I’ve never been through such experiences? In the article “How Teenagers Find Themselves,” Charles Q. Choi discusses how certain scenarios can trigger basic emotions, which can make a teenage girl more emotional or experienced than an adult woman. That’s when I realized that it can take longer for some teenagers, like
myself, to discover their true identity, because of experiences that may not have fully challenged us yet.

The idea of having to describe our identity and where our path might take us in the future in a college essay can be a pressure-filled task because we feel there is a need to please the adults in the admissions office. We are just teenagers, and not all of us have had an experience that created who we are as a whole. Many of us are still finding ourselves and have a different mentality from others our age. In the process of writing my college essay, I was trying so hard to see the word “ACCEPTED” on my admissions letter that I wasn’t being truthful to myself. Most colleges should know that just because we are approaching adulthood pretty soon, our age shouldn’t determine what makes us mature, and not all of us have a sob story, or other impactful life experiences. Colleges should have an open mind to those who are trying to figure out who they truly are and aren’t able to express themselves to a full capacity