devyanisawant
Jul 15, 2015
Undergraduate / Escaping the labyrinth-college application essay [2]
Instead of using a topic given by UChicago, I decided to make up a topic of my own.
My prompt:
"You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present."-John Green, 'Looking For Alaska'
My response:
Our entire school career, we spend our free time learning new skills, participating in various school activities and studying hard to create the perfect college application résumé that will make every Department Of Undergraduate Admissions swoon. Some people are really great in studies and are in every Honor and AP class there is, some kill it in organized sports while others excel in arts. There are several Einsteins, Serena Williamses and Edgar Degases in every school's every batch. We start piano lessons and ballet classes from the time we were six so that we can make to our dream college and have the best experience of our lives.
I am not a superstar when it comes to studies; I might be in the top 10 percentile in my class but I am not going to be invited to join Mensa any time soon. I lack the general enthusiasm and hand-eye coordination required to make it to my school's football or basketball team and while I can play the basics on a guitar, no one is going to beg me to join their band because of my immense "skills". But the one thing that I, and almost every single person on this planet, am actually good at is dreaming for a wonderful and colorful and just plain awesome future for myself. I have all these great plans of getting out of my hometown and going to a great college where everything in my life will fall into places. I imagine that I will step foot on the campus and suddenly everything will burst with colors and the reprised version of 'When Will My Life Begin' from Tangled will start playing in the background and all my dreams finally attain fruition. My life will start making sense and I will finally find my place in this world.
You see, I have plans for my life, huge plans. I have my entire life mapped out. I know which college I want to get into, where I want to go for medical school, where I want to do my surgical residency and what my specialty will be. And that is what keeps me going. I like to have plans, be in control of any and every situation I find myself in and be prepared (at least when it comes to dare devil-ish events like being a passenger in a car that is going more than 100 mph).
People have plans. That is what people do. They have plans and those plans keep them going. Their dreams for tomorrow gives them hope to keep on holding today. And I am pretty sure that is why we have bucket lists. Our bucket lists are our plans for the future. But we never really strike out everything on it unless we have a terminal disease and only a few months left in the land of living (we have learnt in chemistry that there are exceptions to everything so please don't be personally offended if you have).
Our entire lives we just keep hoping for a better tomorrow. We plan our lives but we never really live them. We use our seemingly bright future to escape our cloudy present. And in doing so, we forget that we are the suns of our own lives. We are the ones who have the choice of making our present cloudier than it is by imagining an even brighter future. We close off all the exits from the labyrinth that is life and therein lays our greatest skill.
So for my special skill or the ability that is going to set me apart from all the Einsteins, Serena Williamses and Edgar Degases that are going to be applying to this prestigious university this year, I would like to put down 'expert weatherwoman for I excel in making my present life seem cloudy and bleak'.
I am really looking forward to the amazing and constructive feedback by the users of this site and I hope that by the time I have to actually submit this essay, it will be pretty good.
Instead of using a topic given by UChicago, I decided to make up a topic of my own.
My prompt:
"You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present."-John Green, 'Looking For Alaska'
My response:
Our entire school career, we spend our free time learning new skills, participating in various school activities and studying hard to create the perfect college application résumé that will make every Department Of Undergraduate Admissions swoon. Some people are really great in studies and are in every Honor and AP class there is, some kill it in organized sports while others excel in arts. There are several Einsteins, Serena Williamses and Edgar Degases in every school's every batch. We start piano lessons and ballet classes from the time we were six so that we can make to our dream college and have the best experience of our lives.
I am not a superstar when it comes to studies; I might be in the top 10 percentile in my class but I am not going to be invited to join Mensa any time soon. I lack the general enthusiasm and hand-eye coordination required to make it to my school's football or basketball team and while I can play the basics on a guitar, no one is going to beg me to join their band because of my immense "skills". But the one thing that I, and almost every single person on this planet, am actually good at is dreaming for a wonderful and colorful and just plain awesome future for myself. I have all these great plans of getting out of my hometown and going to a great college where everything in my life will fall into places. I imagine that I will step foot on the campus and suddenly everything will burst with colors and the reprised version of 'When Will My Life Begin' from Tangled will start playing in the background and all my dreams finally attain fruition. My life will start making sense and I will finally find my place in this world.
You see, I have plans for my life, huge plans. I have my entire life mapped out. I know which college I want to get into, where I want to go for medical school, where I want to do my surgical residency and what my specialty will be. And that is what keeps me going. I like to have plans, be in control of any and every situation I find myself in and be prepared (at least when it comes to dare devil-ish events like being a passenger in a car that is going more than 100 mph).
People have plans. That is what people do. They have plans and those plans keep them going. Their dreams for tomorrow gives them hope to keep on holding today. And I am pretty sure that is why we have bucket lists. Our bucket lists are our plans for the future. But we never really strike out everything on it unless we have a terminal disease and only a few months left in the land of living (we have learnt in chemistry that there are exceptions to everything so please don't be personally offended if you have).
Our entire lives we just keep hoping for a better tomorrow. We plan our lives but we never really live them. We use our seemingly bright future to escape our cloudy present. And in doing so, we forget that we are the suns of our own lives. We are the ones who have the choice of making our present cloudier than it is by imagining an even brighter future. We close off all the exits from the labyrinth that is life and therein lays our greatest skill.
So for my special skill or the ability that is going to set me apart from all the Einsteins, Serena Williamses and Edgar Degases that are going to be applying to this prestigious university this year, I would like to put down 'expert weatherwoman for I excel in making my present life seem cloudy and bleak'.
I am really looking forward to the amazing and constructive feedback by the users of this site and I hope that by the time I have to actually submit this essay, it will be pretty good.
