Undergraduate / Instilled Certainty - My Supplement Essay for Princeton University [5]

This is my supplemental essay for Princeton University.

Prompt (500 words maximum): Tell us about a person who has influenced you in a significant way.

Instilled Certainty

The force that was my eighth grade English teacher powered me through the trials of a 13-year-old. On her resume, her job included teaching eighth graders the correct syntax and structure of a complex sentence and discussing the importance of embedding quotes with parenthetical documentation. Those may have been the skills she needed to list under "Job Experience," but Ms. Crancer lifted me up and fought for me. No amount of bulleted skills can compare to the confidence she planted in the folds of my cortex.

I had been placed in Honors English, which was only below the "Gifted and Talented" English course in my middle school, and I was perfectly content being where I was. The first unit was writing poetry, and while most of my peers groaned, I laid out deep vocabulary and inexpressible emotion. Without warning, my Honors teacher was pushing me towards the GT class, and I blanched at her faith in my potential. I'm a hard worker, but there's not a chance that I can handle a GT class. Wasn't anyone willing to listen to my reality, that I stood on two shaky feet constantly, that it took me twice as long to get my homework finished at night? Humility masked my spiraling insecurity, and soon thereafter I was officially gifted and talented. My heart shook. It was about to become painfully apparent how unprepared I was compared to the elite.

Terrified, I watched Ms. Crancer pass back our first essays. The "A" glittered in red below my chocolate eyes, disbelief scrawled across my expression and throughout my veins. Was it so unusual that I was good enough, accessible to this distant and subjective concept of intelligence? In so many words, grades, facial expressions, and lectures Ms. Crancer challenged our emerging integrity and ethics through essay prompts and discussions. What would we do if faced with the dire situations of our novels' protagonists? I struggled between the conflict of writing my perception of her expectations and writing my own truth. This periodically led to me using tentative phrases such as "I think" and "I suppose" at the end of a sentence, and immediately she would cross them out. Pushing me to the edge of uncertainty was what she was doing; it transformed her from an ordinary English teacher to a surrogate mother demanding confidence from her dazzling daughter. When she passed back our streams-of-consciousness, her commentary next to the perfect score revealed her understanding of a young psyche that hadn't even approached its full formation yet.

Before we left for high school, she shared her final thoughts with the class. "Establish your code of honor and live by it. Be the hero of your own life. Take the less traveled roads." She encouraged us to continue reading and thanked us for our role in her "journey." I write this in honor of the surrogate mother who taught me to believe in the power of pen and paper, the one weapon of mass construction, I'm sure.