<p>Here is my essay:
Tell me if its Ivy League quality and how well its written.
Thank you in advance for your help </p>
<p>Growing up in Jamaica, toys were a rare commodity. Money was scarce in my family, so putting food on the table dominated our financial concerns, not buying toys for the kids. If I were lucky, Id find a yo-yo with a dirty, worn string or a pocket car always with on of its tires broken. My friends, many of whom shared my predicament, and I had to invent creative ways to fulfill our innate childish desiresto have unlimited amounts of fun. And so my friends and I found an endless amount of things to enjoy ourselves, such as poorly sculpting old pieces of wood to make cricket backs; using the various Apple, Mango and Geniepa fruit the size of a grape with a green outer casing and orange insidestrees in my neighborhood as both our afternoon nourishment and as our jungle gyms; and riding on old, wooden carts down steep perilous streets. Our best inventions, however, were our box-trucks.
A box-truck is a simple, yet eclectic conglomeration of parts: four fruit juice boxes, at least eight bottle caps, four stems from coconut tree leaves, and about 8 inches of thread. To obtain the bottle caps and fruit juice boxes, my friends and I would travel down to the gully down the street, a place inundated with trash. Wed get the thread from our respective homes and the stems from a coconut tree. After we had collected all our supplies, wed sit together, sharing nail to pierce holes into the bottle caps that would become the tires and scissors to cut the boxes into certain shapes.
The finished product resembled an 18-wheeler; unlike it though, our box-trucks were more vibrant and much feebler. A tire fell off because off if too big of a hole was pierced in it; the sticks that held the tires on the truck broke at the slightest turbulence; and the whole vehicle crumbled if stepped on. In our boyish jubilance, wed often destroy these trucks in days.
Childhood poverty and lack of opportunity taught me to appreciate the resources available to me today; my box-truck building experiences taught me how to use them.
When I entered the 6th grade, I was reading at a 4th grade level, I was placed in the lowest possible classes in my middle school because of it. Determined to change that, I worked diligently to become a better reader, keeping word journals to improve my vocabulary and studying grammar books. By the 10th grade, I was reading books by Cornel West and Stephen King.
All this wouldnt have been possible if I werent surrounded by the resources, which I fully utilized. I often maxed out my school and public library cards and asked my teachers whenever I couldnt understand something. Soon I will be the first in my immediate family graduate high school and go to college. At college, I hope to get a higher education as well as to dance, to learn how to play an instrument, to travel the world and to acquire the skills necessary to give poor kids like myself in Jamaica and throughout the world opportunities to better themselves. I know that I accomplish these goals at the University I attend because I plan to exhaust the resources that it will provide me to do so.</p>