Undergraduate /
Common App Essay - My Bus Experience [3]
I really need to know if this produces a profound effect in the reader, or if its just no good at all. Any comments welcome.
Prompt:
Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.
It was one of the greatest achievements in my short life. It was as great as I had imagined it would be for the three long months I had labored to get there. The speakers boomed with music as I tried to make my way closer to the stage to get a better view of my favorite band, Bloc Party. It was hard for me to comprehend how much effort it had taken to finally get here, all the blood, sweat and tears that me and my friends had poured into making it from our humble abodes in suburban New Jersey to the sprawling metropolis of Chicago. I had worked three months in order to turn a junker of a bus into the best road trip bus possible. We had traveled more than 800 miles in two days (without much sleep) just to make it to the three day music festival Lollapalooza in Grant Park, Chicago.
It all started as an idea the summer before when one of my friends had suggested that we go on our own road trip after watching movies on Comedy Central. At first I dismissed it as nothing more than a fantasy. However, as the months rolled by this fantasy kept coming closer and closer to reality. My friend's father had an old junker of an RV that was little more than an old NJ Department of Corrections bus which had a bathroom. It wasn't pretty, its paint job had all but chipped off and it was rusted over in many areas. The interior was barren except for an old musty couch which was not too comfortable due to the springs which would pop up and hit you at each bump in the road. Thankfully, the bathroom already had a toilet connected to a sewage tank. However the rest of the room was in disrepair and the door was nothing but a piece of plywood with an i-hook in it to keep it from opening. It wasn't the greatest bus in the world, but we would soon turn it into a bus like no other.
My friends and I started working on the bus in the beginning of summer; we only had two months before the show. My work with that bus gave me a respect for any type of hard labor job. I first planned out what we thought the bus would need in for our road trip. After extensive brainstorming and arguing over the feasibility of each aspect and its effects on our paltry coffers we decided on what the bus would contain. We decided on two primary objectives, installing a sound system worthy of Lollapalooza itself and a custom paint job which would turn heads.
While my friends got to work on getting an artistic friend to paint the bus, I went to work installing a speaker system. My main obstacle was that I really didn't know anything about speaker systems, so I researched furiously. After about a week of browsing as many DIY sound system guides and a whole bunch of technical pamphlets, I had a rudimentary idea of what I was doing. Now that I had an idea of what I was doing, I began to gather the necessary materials. It felt like I had visited every garage sale and pawn shop within the tri-county area. In the end though, I got the materials. The hard part was assembling it all. I worked every day for nearly a month trying to make the system work. Whenever I got one speaker to work, another would just take its place. I had to fix a fan next to the amp because it was always overheating. It seemed like an endless battle to get it done, but in the end I was able to make it work.
There was only one major thing left to do, and that was paint the bus. As I worked setting up the speakers in the bus I had noticed that the person my friends got to work on the paint job had never come. They assured me that it would get done and told me not to worry. Time was slowly ticking away until August 1, the first day of the festival. Their painter friend, Steve, finally showed up four days before we were supposed to leave. I remember the day vividly because there was a torrential downpour outside. Despite this, I had to paint. I got a tarp and threw it over half of the bus so that we could work in the rain. We painted through the inclement weather but completed less than a quarter of the work. At the end of the day Steve informed us that we were on our own for the rest. It was a rough three days afterwards but we managed to get the bus done. There aren't words that are suitable to describe how I felt when I finished painting the bus. Just a few days prior I wholeheartedly thought that the trip was off and all my hard work had been wasted. For three days I did nothing but paint from 9AM to 7PM so that I could bring my goal to reality. When I finished, I could do nothing but look and admire the bus that I had worked on for two months.
As I marveled at my accomplishment I pondered over the events that occurred over the last two months. I realized that I was only an inch away from having my hard work yanked out from under me. What would I have done if I hadn't gotten it painted and did not go to Lollapalooza? Looking back, I should have seen that the paint job wasn't going to magically paint itself. I can see now that being proactive and independent are important attributes for me to develop. No one is going to come to my aide as an adult. If I want something done I have to do it myself.
