Common App Essay: What I learned playing piano at a nursing home.

I think my essay fits under this topic:

Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.

...however, I feel like I could expand on this wayy more, but I don't want it to drag. I mean, am I being redundant in my essay? Any suggestions?!

Thank you guys so much!!

Essay Topic Choice #1:

Playing the piano has always been a big part of my life, especially once I realized how it could function as a form of therapy and relief for people that have different neurological disorders. When I was in middle school, I started going to the nursing home that my mom works at and playing piano for the residents there. Through these trips, I valued the skill that I have even more, not just as something I could do, but something I could do for other people.

They have a very old banged up piano that needed a good tuning, but whenever I start to play, their lunchroom would fill up with the residents. Some of them were crotchety old men that refused to listen to the nurses, but when I started playing, they would yell at the nurses to "shut up." Many of these residents have Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, Dementia, Schizophrenia, are bipolar, or have combinations of these. My mom would always come home from work and tell me of all the different trouble they had gotten into. One day, the nursing home got a call from a university, looking for one of their residents who had claimed to be a professor, because they were going to offer him a teaching position! Some others just like to escape from the nursing home and actually take a bus and go into Minneapolis. Nurses had to go after him, and try to find him in the bustle of the city!

Even while I play simple little songs that the residents recognized, or movement after movement of a classical piece, they all seemed genuinely happy and at peace. They forgot about their pain and all the struggles they'd been through with having to deal with their diseases. Some of these people didn't even recognize their own family, but still recognized a melody that they had sung as a kid or a piano piece that they had heard on the radio. One resident could hardly move any part of his body, but his eyes would tear up as he heard me play, because he used to be a piano teacher and remembered when he himself used to play away.

What about music is so pleasing and therapeutic to these people? I have watched Dr. Oliver Sacks' program on NOVA called "Musical Minds," which was about the research he conducted to find the connection between music and the mind, and read his book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. It's powerful enough for people to recognize, even the people that can't recognize their own family anymore. It's relaxing enough for them to forget their own pains. And most importantly, its uniqueness makes their days better, and put a smile on their faces. It inspires me to devote my life towards developing a cure through music to help the people that have these neurological disorders.

P.S. Is it too short?

Were they playing the little songs or classical pieces? If not, rephrase.

While doing so, remember not to use a pronoun (rather than the proper noun) in the first sentence of a paragraph, as this may confuse the reader as to what or whom the pronoun refers.

So, in revising this sentence, you need to say "the residents" instead of "they" and also adjust either the main clause or the introductory phrase, the subjects of which currently conflict.

The essay is strong but would be stronger if, in your conclusion, you demonstrated your intellectual curiosity by showing that you have taken the trouble to look for answers to your question about why music moves people so deeply and/or educated yourself about the ways that music is particularly useful to people with neurological disorders. I don't mean that you should turn this into a research paper, just that you should show yourself to be somebody who doesn't idly wonder such a thing without at least doing a little Googling to see what experts such as Oliver Sacks have to say about it.

You might want to focus more generally on the "its impact on you" part of your essay. At the moment, I can picture the nursing home really well, and see the benefit your music had for the residents (which is good), but I can't really see what you learned from the experience or how it changed you, or how the experience has anything to do with your plans to attend university (which is not so good).

Since you asked whether your essay is too short or not, I wanted to know how long should the Common App main essay be. Can someone please answer this?

Thank you all for this advice! I've added information about research that Dr. Oliver Sacks has done, fixed my grammatical errors, and tidied it up a bit more, in general.

I'm submitting this Common App essay, along with 3 (THREE!!!) other essays, and 3 short answers to Brown University this Friday, as I'm applying Early Decision.

Again thanks!

Nada Batu