Undergraduate / Bowdoin Supplemental Essay: Ears Open [2]

In an effort to understand your interests and aspirations for college, we ask you to select one of the three topics below and provide a response of up to 250 words. Please include your name, birth date, and your topic choice at the top of the page.

Bowdoin students and alumni often cite world-class faculty and opportunities for intellectual engagement, the College's commitment to the Common Good, and the special quality of life on the coast of Maine as important aspects of the Bowdoin experience. Reflecting on your own interests and experiences, please comment on one of the following:

1. Intellectual engagement
2. The Common Good
3. Connection to place

The phone rings round-the-clock-as it always does Saturday afternoon. I pick up and reply: "Heartland... Hospice, this is Moises speaking." On a good day, with plenty of coffee, my spiel is polished and precise-not a stammer! But, that's on a good day. After the usual (monotonous) protocol of inquisition, I cease the curt secretary-act. I recall. It is Moises speaking; besides, formalism can be like wearing a wool turtleneck to a five kilometer race. Unexpectedly, the caller is the funeral director.

A few hours later the door swings open. A large group, with identically despondent countenances, files into the foyer. I overhear the nurses discussing the elderly man with lymphoma passing away in the morning. As each individual approaches reception, I pull my head up from my chest and muster a soft smile. "Good afternoon folks, would you please sign in here?" Each of the visitors does so. The last to sign, an elderly woman, cracks a fleeting smile, then scurries into the corridor with the rest of the group.

For a while, the hospice is silent-solemnity. Never before had I witnessed life and death as vividly. Now, formality was indeed appropriate.

The elderly woman returns, alone, with her eyes red and puffy; she takes a seat by the window adjacent to my desk.

"How are you, ma'am?" I ask.

She sniffled and then began: "I knew, but I could never be ready." She recounts her deceased husband's life and their thirty-eight year marriage.

Undividedly, I listen.

How do you thing the admissions committee would react to this? Any feedback or corrections would be highly appreciated. Thanks!