The Gate Was Still There by Jeheon

The Gate Was Still There by Jeheon - July 2026 Scholarship Essay

When my classmates declared the American Dream dead during our discussion of The Great Gatsby, I couldn't have disagreed more. My parents were Korean immigrants who bet their livelihood on opportunities in the US, and I'd grown up hearing my relatives' stories of leaving Korea, searching for better opportunities, or escaping situations that limited what they could become. I was specifically told that my parents' success would've been impossible elsewhere. To me, that was the proof my classmates were missing.

But as we kept picking apart the novel, I realized my proof and their argument weren't actually answering the same question. Gatsby doesn't fail because he lacks drive. He fails because the Dream he's chasing was never built for someone like him to reach. My classmates weren't saying nobody makes it. They were saying the system decides who gets a real shot, and my family's story, however true, was one outcome, not a rebuttal to that pattern.

That was hard to sit with. I didn't want to give up the belief that my parents' success meant the Dream was alive and working. So I went back to my relatives and asked more specific questions than I ever had before, not just "did things work out," but what exactly had been closed off to them before they left, and what specifically opened up once they got here. My grandfather told me he'd been passed over for advancement at his company for years despite training the people promoted above him, simply because he lacked the right university connections. Hearing it laid out that specifically, I couldn't keep treating my family as a general case. We'd made it through a gate. That didn't mean the gate wasn't there for other people.

That shift in how I thought about my own story ended up shaping how I approached a much smaller problem later. When Quizlet put a subscription plan in front of the studying platform I relied on, I saw how many people lost access overnight just because they couldn't pay. I could've called building an alternative "bringing opportunity to everyone" and left it at that, the same kind of language I almost used to defend the American Dream without really examining it. Instead, I tried to hold onto the more complicated version of that idea: build something that removes one real barrier, without pretending it fixes everything around it. I gathered a small team of student developers, and in a few weeks we built Cramless, a free alternative that grew to over 100,000 accounts. It told me the gap I saw was real, not that I'd solved it.

I still believe the American Dream isn't dead. But I don't believe it the same way I did walking into that class. Fitzgerald didn't convince me opportunity doesn't exist. He convinced me that one family's success, including my own, isn't enough evidence to say it exists equally for everyone, and that noticing that difference is what actually pushed me to go build something.