Allana Shared her College Application Essay with us. Her dream was to study biology so she used this personal statement to express her interest and to convince the college admission officer to accept her college application. Check more college application samples here.

To say I was a tomboy growing up would be an understatement. The house I grew up in was on an acre of land full of frogs, snakes, toads and turtles, and I spent my days in pursuit of making them my “pets”. On the weekends my grandfather would take me fishing, and I was equally fascinated with the other aquatic creatures we saw there as I was with catching fish.

A cute little painted turtle named Dimitri was the first real pet I can remember having. I had a one gallon goldfish bowl adorned with pebbles and a rock he could sun himself on through my bedroom window. Later I developed the habit of keeping garter snakes in large cardboard boxes in our basement, a habit my mother was not so fond of, as the boxes hardly proved impenetrable to the slithery reptiles, and doing a load of laundry often entailed a ‘close encounter’ with one of my escaped playmates.

of all kinds were a fascination of mind as far back as I could remember. I had a stack of reference guides in my room covering everything from the snakes of Australia to the blue whale. The more I learned about these amazing creatures, the more my curiosity was piqued. In school, I was always a bit disappointed that my early science classes covered subject matter beyond the creatures I was so fascinated with. Cumulus clouds and tide patterns were interesting, but pale in comparison to the reptiles and sea creatures I was obsessed with.

When I finally got to high school and was able to take a biology class, my whole world changed. Most of the other girls were completely grossed out when we dissected frogs, but I was enthralled with the delicate anatomy we explored, and how it functioned to serve my little green friend before he ‘donated’ his body to science.

There was something I found magical about the intricacies involved in keeping even a simple creature like an earthworm alive and running. The architecture of their internal organs was like mysterious, foreign machinery to me, and I wanted only to understand its inner workings and glimpse at the brilliance ‘behind the curtain’ of life.

As further studies nurtured my interests in biology, I began to see that with this work came not only the ability to study and understand earth’s creatures, but to lobby for their preservation, as well as the preservation of the natural environments that embrace them. That pretty much sealed the deal for me. I had developed a deep love of animals, particularly the lowly reptiles I found so fascinating as a young girl.

A life and a career dedicated to the further understanding of these creatures, and in support of treating them and their habitats with respect is one I will be proud to call my own.  Animals bring magic and mystery into our lives. The more we can understand about these wild, vicious, gentle, magnificent creatures, the more we may be able to understand about ourselves.

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