Posted by Sarah E. Crane (BA ’09), Editorial Intern
Hometown and High School: Naples, Fla.; Gulf Coast High School
Applied To: BYU, BYU–Idaho, University of Southern Florida, Florida Gulf Coast University, and University of Central Florida
Major Plans: Chemistry teaching
Interests and Achievements: Played trumpet in junior high and high school; sang in choir and musical theater; went on a one-month summer excursion with Outward Bound in the Florida Keys, where she lived on a boat and learned survival skills.
Plans to Bring to Provo: A stack of medical mystery novels for any spare reading time
A Long Shot: “I wanted to get as far away from my family as possible, not because I don’t love them or anything, [but] because it’s nice to be out on your own,” says Sarah Egbert of her college aspirations. BYU was her dream school, and making it a reality wouldn’t come easy. “My high school grades weren’t exactly as high as they could have been, so I had to make up for it,” she says. “I took all honors and AP classes, anything I could find.”
Just to be sure, Sarah started her application seven months early to give herself plenty of time to meet the priority deadline—what she felt was her only real chance of getting in. “I started my application in July,” she laughs. “But they didn’t have most of the application online until the end of September.”
The essay portion of the application proved to be poignant for Sarah. “It was about different personal struggles in your life that had made an impact, events that have had an impact on your character,” she remembers. Not much of an essay writer, she began plugging away. She wrote about her parents’ divorce when she was 11, how she had to grow up quick when her father left and her mother went to work. About how she had to push aside the jump rope and the tree house to make room for laundry and dinners. She wrote about marching in her high school’s band and acting in plays with the drama department, how she had to get over her shyness to perform for people. Before she knew it, she was out of space. “The hard part about writing the essay was keeping it under 300 words,” she says.
Woohoo!: Because someone misplaced a form her seminary teacher had sent in, Sarah missed the priority deadline and had all but given up on going to BYU. “I had pretty much already decided that I was . . . going to BYU–Idaho,” she says. “[But] I was waiting for the letter, you know, just in case.”
Three weeks after submitting her application, Sarah checked its status online, just as she had done so many times before. “I was in my AP environmental science class, and we were doing a lab that day with computers,” she remembers. “I was like, really quick I’ll just check it.” What she found was hardly what she expected, or even how or when she expected to find it. “Sitting in the middle of science class and you finally get your college acceptance letter?” she laughs. “That turns some heads.” After all the months of worrying about applying to BYU, the end had come. “It was just kind of one of those ‘Yes!’ moments,” she says. “I didn’t really scream, ‘Yes!’ It was more a ‘Woohoo!’”
For most people, snow isn't a big deal, but for me, it is. I come from a tropical paradise where people put on scarves and mittens at 60 degrees (that's Fahrenheit, not Kelvin). Before this winter I had never been in a snowball fight, built a snowman, made a snow angel, had my legs sink up to my thighs when I stepped in the wrong place, or even seen snow for that matter!
Posts
