College app essay. oh fun. Good afternoon. My name is Elizabeth Santos. This is not a story about my life. This is a story about my death. My friend died a month ago. His heart stopped while he was running up a hill. Eighteen years old and he was gone. At the memorial service, his family and hundreds of friends packed themselves into two halls. For an hour we shared our memories of him, memories woven into stories that praised the presence of his life in our own. It was a presence so vibrant that we shall never forget his smile or the ring of his laugh, even though he no longer breathes the air that we take for granted everyday. Nick's constant zest for life changed those he loved, but the experiences that we shared with him may as well have never existed had we lacked the capability to recall them. Why? It's simple. Memory defines us. If we were to live without another’s life ever touching our own, if the amendments made in our world were to never affect us or how we live, if no one ever made a difference, the human race would never evolve. The earth would never change. In fact, the word “change” would not exist. Nick and I were classmates who survived under the stress of angular momentum and fellow rowers who shared experiences that have changed me permanently. Through these experiences, these memories, he has touched my life, and I have become a different person. I, in turn, will touch the lives of others and change them. I have the ultimate membership that requires neither card nor fee: the membership of an interlaced web that stretches its fingers to every living being on the earth. We're changing each other. Those whose lives I touch will never be the same, just as I am never the same from knowing Nick. In this thought, this sentence that you read in your mind, or perhaps out loud in front of a table of admissions officers; or by yourself, laying under your favorite tree, I am changing you. I am altering your thoughts and your experiences. Each word that you absorb carries you further into the memory that you will gain from reading this. Because I have existed, because I have written this essay, and because you are reading it, you are changed. Good afternoon. My name is Elizabeth Santos and I love my life. However, this is not a story about my life. Rather, this is about my death. It is about the undeniable truth that when I leave this planet, when my fists can no longer clench in excitement and my eyes are dry of color, this world will be changed, simply because I existed, simply because the memory of me lives in the fires of others’ minds, as Nick’s does in my own. This world is elastic; a constantly stirring, sprouting, modernizing environment that changes with every letter I type, with every word you read, with every step we take through the paths of our own unpredictable lives.