I don't really know if this is supposed to be 500 words, but mine is longer....my bad...any advice? here goes!
Prompt: Beyond your impressive academic credentials and extracurricular accomplishments, what else makes you unique and colorful?
My essay is attached and below:
I have this dream of being a vegan and eating purely organic food, but as of right now, my ginger ale may be the closest thing to pure ginger in my fridge. I have wild, outrageous, and possibly impractical goals for my lifetime. At eleven, I climbed Mount Fuji, and decided I would climb Mount Everest, even if I died trying. My parents then suggested I search Mount Everest and see what happens when someone dies during a climb, that dream died painfully as I scrolled through Google images. So maybe I won't make it to the top, or make it there at all, but Cinderella taught me that a dream is a wish your heart makes. Fast-forward six years, ten countries, and five continents, from Canada to Rwanda, and here I am scrolling through college confidential, the website I promised I would never use. And as I'm reading these essays from other students, I realize that I may be as bland as a saltine cracker. Not even an oyster cracker, so far from a pita chip, and don't even talk about Triscuits. I always liked to think that I was, in fact a colorful person, maybe a little darker, I'd really love to say mysterious, but that reminds me of Robert Pattinson in the Twilight movies. I'm not a vampire or werewolf, gosh I'm not even from an ethnically diverse family. On paper, I look like the same old applicant, like a saltine cracker without the salt, that bland.
But feel free to just crumble that little saltine cracker into a million pieces, because in reality I'm more like a lentil cracker dipped in red pepper hummus. People call me sarcastic; I am brutally honest, and I tell it like it is. Since the fifth grade, I've been surrounded by peers who singlehandedly chose to designate me as the 'stuck up rich girl' which is funny seeing as I have exactly $892.38 in my savings account right now; translation I am loaded, lets buy a yacht! As I've gotten older, my peers decided that because I'm blonde, and apparently a wealthy person who doesn't like to wear sweatpants, I must also be a complete bimbo. But, just like Virginia Woolf once wrote, "call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please-it is not a matter of any importance" I am who I am, and that simple fact cannot be changed.
Even though I would love to spend hours watching documentaries and reading scientific journals, I prefer to get out into my community; whether that means volunteering at Special Olympics tournaments or comforting my hospice patient. That is possibly another irrational dream of mine - to save the world. While I could say that I have a unique passion for helping others, and not many teens take the time to volunteer for used twice in once sentence - find another word causes, I find myself wondering what exactly I'm selling here. I haven't changed the world, I haven't even found the time to start my newest non-profit venture, but in the tenth grade, I did do the Oprah endorsed "Change your brain, change you life" diet, so I'm obviously on the right path. Who knows, maybe I'll find the time to start that non-profit or start an all girls' school like Oprah.
Parents love to explain what it was like when they applied to college, which makes the process for all of us students even more pleasurable. I mean at least I don't have to use a typewriter, but then again, I wonder if I would have turned out any differently if instead of Google I used an encyclopedia. Sadly, I realize that without Google I would never have known that high fructose corn syrup might cause liver failure in the long run. Maybe I'm a dreamer, just another person. But these little bullets wound tightly in my paperback are just waiting to find the wild, out outrageous, and impractical person who began writing them years ago. So maybe that's what I'm selling, a piece of myself, a crumb from my lentil chip, and a little taste of that red pepper hummus.
