Undergraduate / Failing the Placement Test : Common Application Personal Essay [2]

I'm not really sure which prompt this would fit best it. Any help (structural, ideal, grammatical) is highly appreciated! Also, I'm not sure what to title it. Thank you!

---------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------- "Honey, I just got off the phone with the school. It's about your test."

At once, a sticky hot wave of panic crushed my ability to form cohesive thoughts. She knew. My extremities tingled and I mentally lunged for the plan I had crafted nervously, days earlier. My mouth began to construct a series of stalling-type vowels (uh, um, oh, ah, etc.). The plan was nowhere to be found, buried in the avalanche of mounting anxiety still tumbling out of my frantic chest. Stuck physically, I gave the ever-slowing kitchen clock a glance and for the first time began to question the validity of my intentions. I had done something objectively wrong. I was going to pay the price. Slow seconds crawled. My hands turned suddenly more damp and shaky as my mom stood and formed herself an intimidating-parent-genre pose, hands stiffly on hips, eyebrows narrow and cocked inward.

A week prior I had for the first time experienced a similar state of worry. When my third-grade year was coming to a close my parents decided to pull me out of my beloved school, against my high-pitched will. A school switch alone was not particularly upsetting. What most disrupted my pleasant year-end train of thoughts was the new school's funding and administration structure: public. Some of my classmates had previously attended public school and whenever the topic arose at a lunchtime conversation they showed no reticence to share their wide-eyed stories. The kids are poor weirdos. Teachers too. The grass is poorly kept. The janitors didn't go to college. One teacher ate a student. All of this, to a third-grader with no sense of B.S., was terrifying. I couldn't do it. Public school was too strange and zoo-like. Determined, I made a lengthy blackboard-flowchart-based plan that would (almost) certainly prohibit me from attending public school.

The crux of my plan: blow the placement test. Before officially enrolling in the new school all students were to take a multiple-choice entrance exam that determines their class placement. I, not intimately familiar with the philosophy of public schools, reasoned that a poor enough grade on the test would leave administrators no choice but to deny my enrollment.

Test Day came and I stumbled nervously over a patch of disturbingly unkempt grass, bid my mom a stuttered goodbye and entered the testing room. When I went to sharpen my spanking new no. 2 pencil my hands trembled with a prohibitive Brownian motion and I abruptly understood the term "trainwreck" in a single-human context. I hadn't wrecked my proverbial train before. Tests were fun to me. Put a third-grade me in Wimbledon with a 30-page spelling test and he would know everything but the definition of "nervous." This was different. It wasn't the pressure of the test crushing me. And despite the overwhelming physical sensations of don't do this I followed through. I found the correct answer on each question and selected the palpably wrong answer on every other question.

"The school says you placed well below average on the test. Do you know why?"

I couldn't make sounds anymore. The only signal I could give to feign innocence was a rapid and discernibly bogus shake of my head. My mom, now several stories taller than me and moving slower in a kitchen-clock fashion, relaxed her pose and eyebrows. My small shoulder was comforted and she graced, "I understand. I'm sorry you have to leave your school." Tears soaked my quivering vision, and a thought trickled into my mind: I am physically incapable of significant deceit.

Undergraduate / Crashing a model plane/ Feynman Lectures/ That House; M.I.T. Short Answer Essays [2]

Here are my drafts for my M.I.T. application. They're pretty rough, so I am mostly looking for advice on overall content (e.g. structure, do I get the message across, should I change topics, etc.). The last essay is too long, so advice on cutting it down would also be helpful.

Thanks in advance!

"We know you lead a busy life, full of activities, many of which are required of you. Tell us about something you do for the pleasure of it. (*)(100 words or fewer)"

You would be surprised how much it physically hurts to crash a model plane. The abrupt sounds and crushing disappointment are unavoidably haunting and at times insomnia-inducing. So where is the fun, you may ask? It lies on the other side: rebuilding. Shamefully taking home mangled shreds of foam and electronics is more than worth the constructive euphoria that follows. Scavenging around the house for spare pieces of duct tape and toothpicks and turning an object that was irrevocably destroyed back into a beautiful flying machine is unusually gratifying, even if the plane has been weightily smothered with 9 ounces of epoxy.

"Although you may not yet know what you want to major in, which department or program at MIT appeals to you and why? (*) (100 words or fewer)"

When my great uncle gifted me his worn set of The Feynman Lectures on Physics I spent 9 days staring into Volumes 1 and 2 so intently I had to borrow my dad's Visine eye drops. The lectures showed me how (for lack of a better phrase) mind-blowing the natural world is. When I visited M.I.T. physics department last Spring everyone there had the same astonishment and hungering curiosity about how the world works. To study physics with people who share my sense of wonder and insatiable interest would be incredible, to say the least.

"Tell us about a time you used your creativity. This could be something you made, a project that you led, an idea that you came up with, or pretty much anything else. (*) (200-250 words)"

"What the heck is an L-O-L?" There really isn't a good way to answer this question. But I was repetitively asked this and similar acronym questions by grandparents, parents, friends' parents, and parents' friends. Unfortunately, acronyms are inherently flawed. Unlike regular words which consist of varying lengths and sounds, acronyms always tend to come rushed off the tongue in the same this-that-this manner. This makes them very easy to forget, which in turn caused me to become an interpreter for my family. But I thought there was a better solution. My first idea was to rid the world of acronyms altogether by starting an ad campaign titled This Is Why We Enunciate, but I soon realized that I lacked both the funding and the connections to start a worldwide movement against letters. My next idea was to create a smartphone application that translated common acronyms into full-fledged words. This idea required no money or powerful connections (other than WiFi, of course) so I gave it a shot. A year later it had over 2500 downloads and I was ecstatic. Unfortunately, acronyms have since been replaced by intelligent auto-correct programs and my application has suffered a loss of user base. Fortunately, though, people are using proper English when they text message each other, and to me that is worth much more than a tiny application.

"Describe the world you come from; for example, your family, clubs, school, community, city, or town. How has that world shaped your dreams and aspirations?(*) (200-250 words)"

There isn't anything noteworthy about where I come from. I grew up in a typical middle class suburb, surrounded by regular suburb-type people who partook in regular suburban activities. But there lies a tad more unusuality in how I came from where I did.

My house was always That House, the one that broke the homeowners association's house color-code because my mom wanted a sky-blue house and a sun-yellow front door.

My dad a pilot and my mom an artist, my experiences growing up were pretty eclectic. When my father was out on trips, my mom and I would rearrange the entire house or paint the walls a loud orange just to see if my dad would notice. Once, we painted the complete score of The Beatles' All You Need is Love on the foyer walls, but even that project pales in comparison to our clandestine cat adoption(s). When my dad was home, which was usually at odd hours in the night, he terminated my bedtime and I stayed up for hours with him sitting in front of a chalkboard, drinking pulp-free orange juice, and discreetly discussing aerodynamics.

Being a resident of That House and having an offbeat upbringing gave me a sense of freedom. Not in the American sense of freedom-from, but a sense of freedom-to; a freedom to be worry-free and creative and learn anything and everything I wanted.

"Tell us about the most significant challenge you've faced or something important that didn't go according to plan. How did you manage the situation?(*) (200-250 words)"

12 hours left. And it didn't work. The machine we had so meticulously CAD-ed and built and programmed 8 hours a day for 6 weeks didn't work.

The robot itself was operational. Every motor turned and the programming was bug-free. The failure lied the the geometrical complexities of our robot's most sacred component: the arm.

Of course, using the phrase "geometrical complexities" makes the issue sound unavoidable and unforeseeable. But anyone with a 9th grade geometry class under their belt could have calculated the error. The arm, which was designed to bring our 120lb. robot 90 inches off the ground in 30 seconds, didn't fit the ladder-rungs it was supposed to grapple.

The realization hit my team and I like a train hits a very disappointed person. I determined we had two options: give up or gamble with an attempt to rebuild. Since our workshop is ladened with stickers reading "FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION" in block letters, we felt obligated to gamble. So we synchronized our watches and set to work, decidedly scrapping the whole arm idea and jazzishly improvising a new bot. Adapting the mechanical components to our new (lack of) design was simple, but before we knew it the watches rang 2230. The only task left was re-calibrating the vision-targeting system (my job as lead programmer) but the math involved was too time-consuming for me to complete in time. So I tried the long-proven strategy of time-crunched programmers: delegation. Soon there were 10 people shouting trigonometric integrals and furiously pounding their T.I. calculators and tape-measuring triangles all over the floor. It was a moment of beauty, if you were a math-person. With 22 minutes to spare the programming was finished, our bot was finished, and we were finished, physically.