Our Application Process

Read below for an example of an outstanding TMS Application Essay, written by Oona Romano F’24.

The essay responds to the TMS prompt, “Living in community is at the core of what we do. What does community mean to you, and how have you fostered it in your world?”

Last summer I left my house in the middle of San Francisco with my brother and father, driving up to the Sierra Nevada foothills. We all carried our phones along with stress from the long work and school weeks. My brother and I had our headphones on, looking at our separate screens while my dad drove in silence. It was early in the morning, and we were headed to the annual Anti-Recidivism Coalition retreat. As the buildings and street lights turned into mountains and trees, we started to forget about our phones that soon we would not be using at all. 

We’ve done this every year since I was six years old — spent a weekend with 75 formerly incarcerated people. The idea is simple: just be there, together, and support people as they rebuild and experience joys of their lives that have been postponed by the justice system. I’ve never fit in, really, at least not externally, and this trip it felt especially obvious: I'm a girl and white and small and young. Still, these annual trips have taught me more about community and vulnerability, and how the two are related, more than anything else in my life. 

I was happy just to be out of the city. There, my community is built around achievement. Each student at my school wants to have the highest grades. Each kid on my soccer team wants to be the best. We don’t say we’re competing with each other, but we are. It makes me feel like if I am not ahead, I am behind. It can be extremely isolating, my peers in my community are all doing similar things, but we don’t really have a common cause. Strange as it might sound, when I join up with dozens of former gang members, many with tattoos up their necks, who stand feet taller than me and have arms the size of my legs, I relax a little. We’re not competing with each other. We’re just together, making each other laugh and hoping each other succeeds.

On the first night of the retreat, we ate dinner with a 32-year-old man I didn't know. He told us how he started serving time for murder when he was 15 and had just gotten out of prison. He had so much enthusiasm for all the experiences he now cherished now that he was out, ones I had unwittingly overlooked. Although he had never met us before, he was so genuinely invested and vulnerable with us. After it got really dark, he showed us different constellations as we all stared at the same sky that we immutably shared, despite our completely separate life experiences. 

The next day we paddled down the American River. In our raft was Jerome, who was 62 who had just lived his first year out of prison for the first time since he was 17. We spent the day balancing each others’ weight in the raft, trusting each other not to screw up on the rapids, laughing, splashing, managing too much gear. 

That night, all of us (who were almost all men), tired and sun-struck, sat around a campfire. The night was not about me — far from it. People talked and I just listened. It was magical and transformative. We’d had to trust each other in simple ways during the day and I think that trust allowed people to be open with a mutual destigmatized understanding. People talked about family members getting murdered. People talked about committing murder themselves. People talked about poverty and heartbreak and close relationships they had in their gangs. People talked about how overwhelming it is to re-enter society after being locked away, thrown out, and forgotten about.

I always hope to bring how much those people embraced me despite our differences and the healing feeling of those weekends home with me, but it’s hard to do. Like my friends at home, I want to do well in my classes and win my games. But I also know I’m best when I’m outside all that. Those ARC trips have taught me that community is not made by people doing the same thing and being “good” at it. Community is made by caring and wanting the best for each other.