I'll finish with a semi-serious post about college while trying to ignore the gaggle of girls giggling and gossiping garrulously behind me. After all, this is supposedly about my epic quest for admission.
(I'll admit that this blog was a random act of spontaneity, and I regret to inform that I just had to check the spelling of "spontaneity" in Microsoft Word.)
My grammar has always been pretty good, ever since my mom decided that my lack of challenge in sixth grade English class was due to a lack of grammar. After a grueling summer working through the entire textbook, "The Writer's Craft", I figured I wouldn't even need to draw out the diagram to tell you the parts of speech in a given sentence.
Little did I know that all of my grammar skills, honed by proofreading my friends' papers through the years, would be little help to me when I came upon my first test on my journey: the application essay. The terrible beast of a task reared up and threw sample essays at me, each one better than the last, each one memorable and seemingly unreproducible in content as well as quality. I cringed, and my forcefield of literature analyses, lab reports, and short stories fell apart around me.
How to make myself unique? How to portray a topic that is personal but not trite, interesting but not trivial? I hadn't cured cancer, built a particle accelerator (although I plan to), or volunteered in third world countries. I spent my summers procrastinating on summer work and volunteering at a local hospital, and also attended music camp, which, although enjoyable, was not particularly helpful to my goal of becoming an engineer.
I started a total of five times on my common application essay. The first was a straightforward essay on why I practically worshipped Dagny Taggart, the protagonist of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. It fell flat on its feminist face, and I got about two paragraphs in when I realized the essay sounded more like a tribute to a fictional character than an insightful realization about how she has influenced and reflected me. I couldn't spin the entire essay about how much I idolized her ability to work effectively in a world of men, the same way I strove to prove myself worthy of a main role on the robotics team when I first joined. It seemed too selfish of a reason, as if I was blaming the world for the situation I was handed instead of trying to solve it.
The second, also about a fictional character, fared no better. I was talking about how much I respected the character, not how much he had affected me. The third essay I wrote was about a habit that had plagued me for many years, but it was impossible to pass this off as an "issue of personal, local, national, or international concern" simply because the habit came out of nowhere and randomly disappeared, what my mother likes to call, "No head, no tail." I wasn't quite sure how it had affected me, and thus had a very weak resulting essay.
The fourth essay was an earnest attempt at assessing a social issue of concern. I had been warned about writing about world hunger or poverty, simply because the truth is, no American teenager is truly preoccupied with solving such grandiose goals save for a passing sympathy. I chose instead to write about how I believed science and technology were not reaching the younger generations, but my disturbance at the lack of hands-on initiatives for young people quickly took on a tone of complaint with the incessant whine of, "We want robots!" This essay joined the others in the scrap heap.
It was particularly difficult for me to do what so many people suggested: "Write about something that the colleges can't see in the academics or activities sections of your application. Write about something for which you have a passion that can't show on a resume." The problem was, I was passionate about my activities, and all of my activities were something that I was passionate about. And as much as I love robotics, I didn't want to beat that poor horse (or robot) to death. Telling about how much I loved spending hours in the shop wiring the speed controllers, assembling the wheels, building the frame, attaching the motors, and troubleshooting the code didn't tell much about me, other than the fact that I liked shuffling around in metal shavings and having my hands caked with axle grease. I enjoyed doing it so much more than writing about it, and I was scared I wouldn't be able to give the feeling justice.
Eventually, though, I found something that I do almost every day, but never give a second thought about writing an essay on. I had it listed as a passion of mine, but I never considered writing an essay about it. But when I did, the words flowed into my mind like the silky shower of jasmine rice, and before I knew it, I had an essay about something I loved doing that affected me and reflected me. I took the essay to my parents, my teachers, my friends, and finally to the monster, who sniffed discerningly and retreated into his cave to read. It remains to be seen whether he deems it qualified, but I'm not going to worry anymore; I put myself on the paper, opened my mind and soul and poured it on down. Now I'll just go whip up something delicious and try to ward off senioritis and the impending freshman fifteen.
Wow. That turned out a lot longer than I expected. But I'm used to storytelling; there's no word limit in most creative writing. In truth, I'm happy that I didn't write one draft and end it there. I'm glad I was critical enough to see how juvenile my previous topics seemed, and how impersonal and generic each would have turned out. And while I could have done without some of the stress and apprehension, I feel justified in the quality of the end result if the journey to get there was difficult enough. And now, off to the other 3,142 essays I have left to write...
No comments:
Post a Comment