Common App Essay Essay - Johns Hopkins

Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others. “As my Instagram account hit six-hundred followers, I temporarily thought I had made it in life.” While this sounds like the musings of an insecure lifestyle blogger, these and other social media accounts I run are not a source of narcissism for me. Rather, to go from no background in marketing to successfully promoting my family’s business is my personal testament to what my loyalty spurred me to begin three years ago. When my mom announced that she was opening a real estate brokerage my freshman year, she may as well have used “we” as the pronoun. My mom had worked tirelessly to be successful in her difficult industry throughout my life, and I was determined to do whatever I could to help the business through its predictably tumultuous first year. Thus began a six-month stint of venturing out to scrub the office more than I ventured upstairs to clean my room, greeting new employees with the enthusiasm only a fourteen-year-old girl can emit, and doling out business cards to the most unsuspecting of recipients: my teachers! By the time summer rolled around, my sense of control had faded into a sense of uselessness. The problem with making a real estate brokerage a “family business” is that, unlike a burger joint or retail store, one can’t exactly get their kids an official job. Although I had volunteered most of my summer to work in her office, I found that my days consisted of completing crosswords while I served as the acting receptionist for an empty building. My eureka moment came when I noticed some trouble my mom was having with advertising. She had made the mistake of paying for Instagram followers in the hopes of garnering exposure, and now her page was infested with users of questionable occupations and objectionable intentions. Everyone knows you can’t buy followers. Everyone knows that, right? It was then that I realized how my fourteen-year-old skill set could finally be used to recreate the practices of this 18+ field. The next day, I asked my mom for all the social media passwords and donned myself with the title of Social Media Liaison. A common misconception is that managing social media is easy, and that’s true; it’s easy to do poorly. My first year, my content and links seemed to fall silent on an empty void. I bit my nails over the crickets that cyberspace was giving me, as if my mom and her agents didn’t deserve to be connected with the people who needed them. It was then that I began to do social media the hard way, but the correct way. I curated a theme, researched trends, and targeted ads to the correct demographics. Slowly, and surely, my nail-biting shifted to fist-bumping. After three years of taps, clicks, hearts, and faves, the business’ viewership has increased 1200 percent, but I’m not stopping there. In an effort to reach out to the elusive millennial market, I’m currently trying to produce a video series; I also hold regular classes at her office so that employees don’t have to learn social media through trial and error like I did. Of course, when the accounts surpassed six-hundred followers, I did not, in fact, figure out my life or even conclude that social media marketing was in my professional future. However, the fact that all this work spurred from a desire to help my mom serves as an example to me of the lengths I go to for people I care about. Subsequently, it was working from this passion that taught me how to reach people, a skill I can horizontally transfer to any field I stick my head into. Whether I’ll be researching MRSA with the CDC or lobbying for health policy, any cause I’m passionate about that needs a hand with outreach knows exactly who to call.