When I was applying to colleges in 2012, I wrote my personal statement about the diversity in my home. Not just the diversity within my immediate family – white American mother, Afro-Caribbean father from a former French colony, biracial daughter (that is, yours truly), plus one loving dog and one semi-hating but very loved cat – but the diversity of all the people in need of shelter who came to stay with us over the years. I wrote about all the people my parents shared our home with throughout my childhood: A white musician from Philadelphia. A Dominican housekeeper. An Indian chef who walked off a cruise ship in the US and never left. An HIV-positive pre-med student. A Salvadoran college student from an abusive family. A teenage, gay foster child. A philosophy student from the farmlands of West Virginia. A high school senior who’d gotten kicked out of her mother’s apartment at fourteen. This is the context in which I grew up. This is also the personal statement that got me into Brown University.

I was raised in a home full of stories. As a young mixed-race girl with an immigrant father, I grew up with an intrinsic understanding that we all contain multitudes, and it is within these multitudes that we find our own individual beauty. After becoming the first student from my high school to be accepted by an Ivy League institution, I spent my college years tutoring and teaching K-12 students between classes and during summer breaks. During my last two summers, I TA’d the Humanities course at MIT Introduction to Technology, Engineering and Science (MITES) – a program I’d participated in myself as a rising high school senior – and helped over fifty students draft their personal statements. Guiding these students as they crafted their personal statements – many of which helped get them into Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, and other Top 50 universities – made me feel like I was back home, surrounded by people of all different backgrounds. It brought me back to what I love most, to the one thing that differentiates humans from all other species: our ability to tell stories.

At the crux of college application essays is storytelling. It’s what gives students a chance to share pieces of themselves that can’t be communicated through grades or test scores or extracurriculars. I had a student who wrote about how Beyonce helped him embrace both his Blackness and his queerness (he went to Columbia). Another student wrote about her younger sister’s chronic illness, which led her to believe in the power of the present moment (she went to Yale). Another student wrote about organizing pep rallies and spirit weeks to create an atmosphere of collaboration over competition at her international high school in Seoul, South Korea (she went to Brown). Another student wrote about the last time he saw his father in person: during a prison visit when he was eleven years old (he went to MIT). I could go on, but you get the point.

Our stories shape who we are, at our core. Both in my work as a college essay consultant and as a photojournalist who’s conducted, transcribed, and edited over three hundred interviews with people of all backgrounds – American, immigrant, white, black, Hispanic, Asian, Middle Eastern, wealthy, poor, able-bodied, disabled – I’ve heard countless people say, “But my story is boring.” And yet, I’ve yet to hear a boring story.

The most meaningful compliment I’ve ever received is that I’m a good listener. As someone who grew up feeling like I was always on the margins – between races, between languages, between countries – I take pride in making people feel seen and heard. My goal is to make sure every student I work with understands that their story matters, and to help them write their college essays in a way that showcases the pieces of themselves that go deeper than any stats can show. Our stories shape us, and I hope to be a part of your journey as you write this next chapter.