College is more than a curriculum and I am more than my grades and test scores.
Impressive... I hope the reader is smart enough to appreciate the depth of your ideas, here...
Whenever you do a compound sentence, use a comma. That is one of the strunk and white rules of style.
College is more than a curriculum, and I am...
(XXX) is my top choice university, and I appreciate the...
While Carnegie's high academic standing and advances in neuroscience drew my attention, ---Replace this with a specific example of an event that occurred or some publication or project that was done by people to make advances in neuroscience. Know what I mean? If you refer to a specific event, place, publication, then you are being a storyteller. Everyone loves stories.
Same thing with the first paragraph. I think you can add a sentence to the first paragraph that will tell the reader specifically what your unique scientific interest is.
I like the "college is scary" thing, but it maybe should be preceded by a good topic sentence for the paragraph.
Anyway, this is great!