Free College Admissions Essays: Describe A Person who has Influenced You :: College Admissions Essays

College Admissions : Describe A Person who has Influenced You Everyone is affected by certain events or individuals that greatly change their life. Many people have influenced me during my life. Three wonderful friends that have had a special effect on me are Robert, Tiffany and Ashley. In the four years that I have known them well, they have been my best friends, and have helped to transform me from a lonely middle school scholar into a happy senior with a decent social life. Popular wisdom has it that, "You judge a man by his friends." Earlier in my life, that would have been difficult, because I had few friends other than my cousins. I concentrated mostly on school and sports, paying little attention to life outside my studies. My high grades made me the target of torment during elementary school, the name calling: nerd, geek, and worse, was so bad that I was ostracized by some of the class, and I shielded myself by further isolation. My Middle School experience was no different. I was still a loner. All the dances passed by, and I found other, solitary ways to occupy myself. I rarely took time to hang out with fellow students during weekends or vacation time. Then came high school, and in Mrs. Krawet's Global Studies I class I sat next to this energetic guy named Robert, who joked about the no-brained teenagers working in 7-11's, made fun of the way our teacher dramatized the pronunciation of the Huang-Ho and Yangtze Rivers, and satirized the teacher's methodology of hand-signals for facts, generalizations, and cause/effect. Finding common ground in our senses of humor, and love of the TV Simpson's, we grew acquainted with each other. Later in the year we teamed up as the defense lawyers in a class mock trial in which Mao Zedong was charged with crimes against the people of China. To Mrs. Krawet's dismay, "legal wrangling" caused the mock trial to last two weeks, even though she had planned for it to take three days, until it was resolved by a split decision, with the jury voting 6 guilty and 6 innocent. More important than the result was the experience of friendship and shared learning. We each had a great deal of fun preparing questions for the witnesses and planning our cross examinations, and after the trial we remained good friends.