Dartmouth: Essay 2: Choose One (Identity)

250 words

Choose ONE: (A) There is a Quaker saying: Let your life speak. Describe the environment in which you were raised and the impact it has had on the person you are today. (B) "Be yourself," Oscar Wilde advised. "Everyone else is taken." Introduce yourself.

What it’s really asking

Both options want the same thing in different keys: a genuine introduction to who you are and where you come from. Option A roots you in a place and the people in it; Option B is an open-floor introduction. Pick the one that gives you a true story, not the one that sounds deeper.

Why they ask it

In a class this small, Dartmouth is building a community, not a stat sheet. They want to know what you would bring to a dorm and a dinner table. This is the essay that makes you a person rather than a profile.

Three ways in

Pick one concrete feature of home

For A, choose a single feature of your environment (a kitchen, a town, a family job, a language) and trace how it shaped a specific habit or value of yours.

Lead with a surprising detail

For B, introduce yourself through a small, true detail that contradicts the obvious version of you, then unpack what it actually reveals.

Anchor everything in one scene

Either way, ground the abstract in a single image and let it carry the meaning, rather than listing adjectives about yourself.

✕ Weak opening

“I was raised in a loving family that always taught me the value of hard work and to never give up on my dreams.”

✓ Strong opening

“My grandmother runs her bakery in Tagalog, Spanish, and the specific dialect of impatience reserved for anyone who touches the dough too early.”

✦ Annotated example · The laundromat night shift. Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →

I was raised in the fluorescent hum of a coin laundromat that my mother opened at six and closed at eleven. ¹My homework table was a folding counter between the bill changer and a row of dryers, and I learned fractions by counting quarters into paper rolls of forty. ²The regulars taught me things school did not. ³Mr. Okafor, a night-shift nurse, explained why he ironed his scrubs even though they would wrinkle by dawn: dignity is a decision you make before anyone is watching. Ms. Reyes paid in dimes and never apologized for it, and I learned not to flinch on her behalf. ⁴I grew up understanding labor as a tide rather than an event. Clothes came in dirty and left folded; the work was never finished, only paused. That rhythm made me patient with slow processes, which is why I like proofs and long experiments that do not resolve until step nineteen. ⁵I also learned the laundromat's quiet politics. ⁶When a machine ate someone's only twenty, my mother refunded it without paperwork and made the loss back in goodwill within a month. She ran the place like a small republic of trust, and I have been trying to build rooms like that ever since: places where people are extended credit before they earn it. ⁷

1"Let your life speak" rewards rooting identity in a concrete place. The laundromat is specific, sensory, and immediately gives the reader a world to stand in.
2Turns the environment into a learning origin story. The detail of "forty quarters" is the kind of texture no generic essay can fake.
3Signals the people of the environment, not just the building, which keeps the essay from becoming a poverty-tour cliche.
4Two named people with one earned lesson each. This gives the environment a livable personality and shows the writer noticing other humans closely, which Dartmouth loves.
5Bridges from setting to mind. It converts the environment into a specific intellectual trait (patience with slow, unfinished work) rather than a vague "hard work" platitude.
6A small turn that adds dimension and avoids a tidy, sentimental ending.
7Ends on a portable value (extending trust first) phrased in the applicant's own image. It answers "how it shaped you" with a forward-looking principle, not just nostalgia, and the closing metaphor stays grounded in the real setting.

Stuck? Start here

What is one room, object, or routine from your upbringing that you could describe so specifically a stranger would see it?
What is a small, true fact about you that would surprise the people who think they have you figured out?
What value of yours did you not choose so much as absorb, and where did it come from?

Before you submit

Did you pick the prompt with the more honest story, not the more impressive-sounding one?
Is there at least one concrete scene or image, not just a list of traits?
Does the essay end with a turn that says what this means about who you are?

Drafted it? Get an honest, admissions-style read, free.

Score my essay