Undergraduate /
Essay for Harvard, Yale, Stanford - What impression do you get? Is it arrogant? [14]
Hello there. I'm British (as the essay says) and I was hoping for some feedback on my CommonApp Essay, as i'm not very familiar with the American Academic Essay style. It's a first draft, and I could do with some pros and cons of the current incarnation.
I wrote it under the 'topic of your choice' option. It is 502 words.
I have lived in England all my life, so I cannot claim the cosmopolitanism of the diversely travelled. What I can claim is an aspiration. I aspire to be an American. In some ways, this does not set me apart; after all, so many millions 'yearning to breathe free' in far worse situations than my own share the dream. But the ease of my British life perhaps makes this aspiration one more deliberately formed.
Despite having seen America so much in my childhood, my uncle living in California, I cannot trace my immigrant aspirations to this early familiarity, though it did put the lie to the anti-American myths that infect so many of my peers and countrymen, and might otherwise have infected me. I trace it instead to an education I charted myself, spanning the years from age fifteen to now, and faceted by friends, books, music and politics.
My best friend, Oliver Joost, is a San Franciscan with a cheerful enthusiasm for his home town and state. Oliver was like a prophet pointing his surfing-weathered finger to the promised land: the 'shining city on a hill'. My understanding of friendship, founded in loyalty and in challenging one another, I owe to him. His qualities matched those he ascribed to his city: he was welcoming to the eccentric and intense, like me, and I try to emulate those qualities. In turn, Oliver has said that he tries to match the depth of my passions: when I feel, be it love, friendship, or ideals, I feel deeply.
Oliver is a Californian, body and soul; as I read American literature, I found that Texan culture resonates with me far more, from the competitive community of Friday Night Lights to its history of independence. I am naturally contrarian, and strongly given to an attitude that a man makes himself, so it seemed a natural fit. When I read The Years of Lyndon Johnson, this affection for Texas set: LBJ embodied the ideal of the man who shapes the world around him, the kind of man I hope to become.
Aesthetically, American music has helped shape my values and my passions in the least quantifiable, but most joyful ways. Apart from my enjoyment of country music, whose themes of dispossession and exile I find particularly haunting, by far the piece of music which has impacted me most deeply is Copland's Rodeo. The story of an outsider, the music's optimism in the Hoe-Down is uplifting to me because it expresses the kind of triumph I treasure, of confounding expectation and disdain with merit.
America, at the very least, shares the very least of my dreams: to make myself. It shares the very greatest of my aspirations: to expand liberty. The character of my politics is American, the belief in accomplishment, the commitment that nobody gets to push another man down, ever. I hope that at university and in life I can share this aspiration with others, this reason I want to step through that lamp-lit golden door.
