Undergraduate / The World I Come From - College required essay [3]

Honestly, I never considered the world I came from to be near as important as the world I was headed for. Now, as college approaches so quickly, I can see how wrong I was, how defined I am by the environment that surrounds me. I am from a beautiful, contradictory world. The two sides of my derivation are so often considered incompatible; I love being the link between them. There is the original side, the side of tradition and fundamentals, a wonderful combination of love for the past and need for human contact. The other side is a quick, electric surge to the future. It is where discovery and logic are tools waged to create understanding. I reside at the nexus of these two intersecting planes. I was born and raised here in this small east Tennessee town. I have always been able to look up and see those mountains run across the horizon. This is a slow gorgeous green world. This land is riddled with southern comfort and people's faces are built with southern courtesy. Here, one finds families and friends and mountain music resounding from rusty trucks. It is an amazing place, and I am particularly fond of my place in it. My time is mainly appropriated between school and church. And, with as much time as I spend there, my church is definitely worth a mention.

I am a member of the two-thousand year tradition of the Catholic faith. I am a reader and a Eucharistic minister on Sundays. I am a Youth Leader on Wednesdays and Mondays. Our youth group is an incredible collection of individuals, and I get the privilege of standing as a role model for the younger classes. Like I said, these are remarkable kids, and I see my main purpose as to make sure everyone knows just how remarkable every person standing around them is. It would be the greatest shame for one of them to go home thinking they did not belong in that church basement. An important aspect of being Catholic in Dixie is just how rare that really is. There is so much ignorance and misinterpretation, and that has had its effect on me. I jump at the chance to clear up confusion and refute an unfounded blanket statement. I love a conversation where two people leave, and both better understand the other. It is an exchange I am proud to say I have had very often.

The other half of my world is an intellectual passion for science and mathematics, as well as literature. It is my school and summer extravaganzas. I have an incredible math teacher who has been dictating those elegant ideas to me for over a year, and I can say he is an enormous driving force for my entrance into the field of mathematics. I admire him without end. Then, there is Governor's School, which I attended two summers ago. This was my first exposure to people who can converse to a crescendo and never cease to be interesting. The next was the Ross Program, which was my first real experience of working with mathematical ideas by myself. Instead of being told the theorems and the proofs, it was eight weeks of plowing through equation and concept. Every experience shed light on a different side of my love for the eloquence of a logical thought.

I have born in me a need for coherency, reason, and understanding, and whether it is understanding the people around me in fellowship or reasoning through abstractions on a chalkboard, I am driven for insight, for conception, for knowledge.

Undergraduate / "The Treble and the Bass" - No prompt, just me rambling [6]

In the sprawling hill country of East Tennessee, I spend an absurdly long time driving through back roads and sparse highways everyday. There is really no better way to let that pavement roll by than a stream of my favorite music coming from the speakers. On my impressively technological dash, I have three adjustments I can make for sound: Treble, Mid, and Bass. These options are left at precise settings at all times.

If unable to guess, Mid shifts the sound from the back of the car to the front. I keep it set to the exact middle. I need balance. I want to be completely surrounded and absorbed in the subject I am exposed to. I let all important aspects of my person permeate through my life and reign in equally from every direction. If something harped too harshly from a certain direction, I would be forced away; I would crave time withdrawn. I adjust until I find equilibrium between my logics and my arts, my beauty and my industry, my physical and my ethereal.

This past summer, I went to the Ross Mathematics Program (affectionately christened "math camp" by my friends). Do not mistake me, it was an incredible experience; however, it was a full eight weeks of constant math, all day, everyday. During the first couple of weeks, it was difficult. Mathematics, this subject that I love, suddenly usurped my world, and I could not stabilize my see-saw life. I did not know the people well enough to engage a social combatant, and the problem sets were too demanding to allow time for the extensive literature I had lugged along with me. It took time for me to find equilibrium in this oddly weighted world, but once I did I was right as rain, steady and proceeding.

The Treble and the Bass on my sound system are set opposite each other. The Treble is set three-fourths to the highest setting, and the Bass resides at only a fourth. The most important part of music is the lyrics. It is the words being said. Everything is subservient to the story being told and the emotion being conveyed. The music conveyed in my car is poetry set to tune, and I strive to do the same with my life. I work toward a life of verse set in motion.

I stare at stars, because eyes should linger about the heavens. I step through darkness jauntily, because dancing in the night seems appropriate. I run through fields of tall grass and play games with creatures that enjoy it more than I. I work hard, and I finish what needs to be done, but I do not sacrifice a moment of beauty for an hour of progress. When someone speaks with me, I listen; I really listen. I strive to every extent to hear the words, the groans, the sighs, and understand the undertones, the substance. I live with all my switches lined up correctly, and hope I can emit my life with the settings all perfect. Give me a futility, and I will show you meaning.

*Revision*
516words for a 500word limit

Undergraduate / Common App Main Essay ("I am a man of ideas.") [5]

Prompt:

Describe a character in fiction, a historical figure, or a creative work (as in art, music, science, etc.) that has had an influence on you, and explain that influence.

Essay:

"I've got a heart full of darkness;
I've got a headache full of dreams
got a lifetime of memories.
I don't know what they mean to this world.
Is there a place in this world for a dreamer,
If dreaming were all he could bring?"
--Darrell Scott [Singer/Songwriter], "There's a Stone around My Belly"

The Hero, the Outcast, the Star-crossed Lovers, the Orphan, the Shrew: these storybook stereotypes, these pieces of humanity, these are the elements that mix and blend and spin the tales that attest to the soul, that are written in ink and told everyday. These shards of culture are the objects of dissection in critiques and literature classrooms everyday, but there is one archetype that has been ignored, that is forgotten, one that is lost to a world that needs it more than it may know. This character is best known as the Visionary or the Prophet, but I like to refer to him as the Dreamer. The Dreamer is an idealist, one that looks out on a chaotic world and sees one cohesive and functional, full of life and intentional. The Dreamer can be anyone from Isaiah to Kennedy; however, they were exceptions, because the Prophet is usually held with disdain and mistrust. The Dreamer yearns to change the world, but in turn has no place in it.

This is me. I am a man of ideas. I have solutions, and aphorisms, and indecisions. I am a Romantic. I am exuberant and inclined to the sins of the mind's limitless fantasies. I am contradictory. I wear buttons that state the wrong belief for the wrong reason on my right breast pocket, for a conversation never arises from an idly held conviction. I am a heart that does more than beat. I find meaning in the simplest peculiarities, and connect even the most distant of concepts. I never wish past what is already mine. Anything that I could possibly desire in the future will come when appropriate if today's choices are made well, not made with a knowing eye pointed toward tomorrow, but with a fundamental philosophy correctly formed. I am utterly imperfect. I fail on half these beliefs everyday, but I fail stupendously. All of this, everything I am, is the result of the culture that surrounds me. I am a great sum of every influence of any man or art that has ever affected me, and the product of their sweet impression.

In To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch taught me humble wisdom; Scout's eternal optimism taught me the art of being a child and showed me the light in people's souls. In The Stand, Mother Abagail exemplifies morality in simple kindness. She showed me how to lead a nation and remain soft-spoken. In The Once and Future King, King Arthur illustrated how to dream beyond the imaginable and how to fail honorably when the world cannot mold as easily as one had hoped. In Dead Poets Society, Mr. Keating, oh Captain, my Captain showed me where the classroom begins and where the classroom ends and all the infinite wisdom in between. Every Romantic poet sits upon a pedestal in my heart, such as William Blake, who taught me how to rhyme and flow and speak intentionally, and how to find meaning in the world around. The modern poet Li-Young Lee taught me the power and color and taste of words. Freeman Dyson, the physicist, showed me the beauty of a logical thought and the natural spirituality of the universe. Darrell Scott taught me to sing, to sing for the past, to sing for my home, to sing for the broken and the lonely and the forgotten, and to sing to the world any worthless, beautiful idea that floods my mind, no matter how unwilling the world is to listen.

I am a Dreamer, a Dreamer who finds the universe misaligned. I intend to do my part, exact my change. I intend to leave this world jarred and shaken and questioning. I have a message, a small reminder, and-this time-the world will listen to its Prophet, its Visionary, its Dreamer.