alright so I'm working on my college essay
and I was having trouble writing into a blank word document, so I figured maybe typing it up on here would motivate me to keep going, as well as allow the opportunity to get some feedback. lo and behold, I now have a finished draft. still a draft, of course, but I'm so happy to be one step closer.
You don’t know it, but your life is about to change forever. The change won’t come immediately, in fact, it will take literally years before you even begin to fully comprehend it. But it begins here, on the corner of 8th Street and 3rd Avenue, at the end of your freshman year of high school.
You’re killing time. You’re planning on going to a party in Park Slope later today, in the hopes that doing so will improve your reputation and increase your visibility in a specific social circle that you’ve been trying desperately to become a part of all year.
You’ll never make it to that party, because as you sit on the steps of a record store with your best friend enjoying a cup of trendy frozen yogurt, two young strangers with handsome, dirty faces and fat, pickle-colored backpacks approach you and tell you you’re beautiful and that they want to hang out with you.
And that’s it. The beginning is so simple. This tiny, trickling capillary will in time grow into a massive artery, pumping the life force that keeps you awake at your demanding independent school, standing through the hours of choral training afterwards, and fueled during your final arduous trek over endless mountains of homework before you can finally rest. While your classmates and many of your friends continue to fight in vain for respect and admiration in the affluent New York high school scene, you return time and time and again to that neighborhood between the streets of 4th and 14th, the avenues of 3rd and D, where life is hard but for some reason you feel like you belong.
Over the course of the next few years, you are exposed to so much more than the average teenager, both good and bad. Your realm of experience grows as if you were living a hundred lives, because each story, each stranger, each single-serving relationship gives you a piece of someone else's history. You revel in their triumphs. You learn from their mistakes.
Of course, this microcosm has conflicts of its own. Though most of its participants no longer participate in the educational system, they squabble in cliques as if through locker-lined halls as opposed to the streets of Alphabet City, the East Village and the Lower East Side. You face challenges trying to migrate between them, and sometimes you are evicted from one sub-group within the subgroup purely by your association with another. But unlike that of the old elite you were once so eager to impress, this rejection doesn't bother you very much. Despite being such a small and tightly-knit community, in that way not dissimilar to your class, the constant flux of people and events through it allow for a diversity that eases the pressure to get one particular type of person to like you. There are simply so many others to choose from.
There are activists trying to change the world, literally every breed of frustrated, good-intentioned radicals: vegans, feminists, anarchists and socialists, to name a few. There are nihilists who've given up on trying, people so beaten down by the reality they perceive around them that they've become misanthropic street-prophets. These unbelievably young men and women dispense advice on self-reliance and loyal friendship alike as if they were wizened sages. They are some of the kindest, smartest, and saddest individuals you have ever known. Despite your undeniable intelligence, they have so much to teach you about the world beyond academia. This information is indispensable: how to survive were you ever to arrive in their situation and, more importantly, how to avoid those circumstances in the first place.
And, so you've learned, one of the most important ways to do so is to go to college.
You don’t know it, but your life is about to change forever. The change won’t come immediately, in fact, it will take literally years before you even begin to fully comprehend it. But it begins here, on the corner of 8th Street and 3rd Avenue, at the end of your freshman year of high school.
You’re killing time. You’re planning on going to a party in Park Slope later today, in the hopes that doing so will improve your reputation and increase your visibility in a specific social circle that you’ve been trying desperately to become a part of all year.
You’ll never make it to that party, because as you sit on the steps of a record store with your best friend enjoying a cup of trendy frozen yogurt, two young strangers with handsome, dirty faces and fat, pickle-colored backpacks approach you and tell you you’re beautiful and that they want to hang out with you.
And that’s it. The beginning is so simple. This tiny, trickling capillary will in time grow into a massive artery, pumping the life force that keeps you awake at your demanding independent school, standing through the hours of choral training afterwards, and fueled during your final arduous trek over endless mountains of homework before you can finally rest. While your classmates and many of your friends continue to fight in vain for respect and admiration in the affluent New York high school scene, you return time and time and again to that neighborhood between the streets of 4th and 14th, the avenues of 3rd and D, where life is hard but for some reason you feel like you belong.
Over the course of the next few years, you are exposed to so much more than the average teenager, both good and bad. Your realm of experience grows as if you were living a hundred lives, because each story, each stranger, each single-serving relationship gives you a piece of someone else's history. You revel in their triumphs. You learn from their mistakes.
Of course, this microcosm has conflicts of its own. Though most of its participants no longer participate in the educational system, they squabble in cliques as if through locker-lined halls as opposed to the streets of Alphabet City, the East Village and the Lower East Side. You face challenges trying to migrate between them, and sometimes you are evicted from one sub-group within the subgroup purely by your association with another. But unlike that of the old elite you were once so eager to impress, this rejection doesn't bother you very much. Despite being such a small and tightly-knit community, in that way not dissimilar to your class, the constant flux of people and events through it allow for a diversity that eases the pressure to get one particular type of person to like you. There are simply so many others to choose from.
There are activists trying to change the world, literally every breed of frustrated, good-intentioned radicals: vegans, feminists, anarchists and socialists, to name a few. There are nihilists who've given up on trying, people so beaten down by the reality they perceive around them that they've become misanthropic street-prophets. These unbelievably young men and women dispense advice on self-reliance and loyal friendship alike as if they were wizened sages. They are some of the kindest, smartest, and saddest individuals you have ever known. Despite your undeniable intelligence, they have so much to teach you about the world beyond academia. This information is indispensable: how to survive were you ever to arrive in their situation and, more importantly, how to avoid those circumstances in the first place.
And, so you've learned, one of the most important ways to do so is to go to college.