Hi! This is my rough draft for my 2012 admission essay. Please don't spare my feelings; be harsh. I'm worried it may be too long...
Reed is a unique and exciting college experience. Discuss the reasons that you believe Reed would be an appropriate place to continue your education
Whenever I mention Reed College, I almost always hear the name Steve Jobs after. As in, Steve Jobs went there, or Steve Jobs dropped out of there, or more likely, Steve Jobs invented Macintosh's interface there. While the presence of Steve Jobs adds more prestige to the college, or any college, the funny thing is that I really do not care. To me, he was just another creative student that happened to be a part of the Reed community for a while; a community I hope to join next fall.
Coming from a rural high school with a total school population of twenty, I knew that when I started applying to colleges my senior year I wanted something small. To go from having twenty peers to having twenty thousand peers would be both daunting and terrifying for me. I happened to stumble across Reed, with its total population of 1400 and I got excited. The fact that it also met my criteria of being a liberal arts school on the West Coast seemed to be fate. I tried not to get ahead of myself but the more I explored it, the more I fell in love.
It started with the Physical Education classes. The fact that I could take a white-water rafting or meditation course seemed so different, so much more fun, than the cut and dry classes I was used too. I knew it was ridiculous to base my college choice off of that alone, so I dug further. I discovered that while Creative Writing is offered, it doesn't fulfill any requirements, be it group or departmental. To me this meant that I would be in classes with people who really loved writing, the ones who chose to do it even if it wasn't going to get them closer to a degree. I also had the opportunity to sit in on one of the Poetry classes and I felt the same sense of closeness that I have experienced in my high school classes. This was due to the fact that instead of sitting in a large auditorium with three hundred students I was in a classroom with six others, sitting right next to the teacher. I have always loved this because I felt that the teacher got to know the students and did not just talk at their students, but taught them.
My high school has a program called Passages. These are six individually designed projects each student must complete to graduate. Each passage has a theme, ranging from Logical Inquiry to Adventure. Students have three mentors who work with them to help complete this: peer, adult and faculty. In addition, you must complete a set amount of hours to get credit and log all of those hours. Because of Passages I have been able to research what it would take to become a kindergarten teacher, and have gotten the opportunity to be a teacher's assistant in our local elementary school. I have also gotten the chance to explore my interest in creative writing by attending a three-week intensive at Sarah Lawrence College, in Bronxville New York. This led me to self-publish a book of my own work with the assistance of best selling author Carolyn Cooke.
What I have developed because of Passages that sets me apart from many other high school students are well-developed independent thinking and self-motivational skills. I don't accept cut and dry education, where you learn definitions from a mass produced textbook. In many ways that isn't so much as learning as conforming to a tired curriculum, where a x will always equal y. I'm interested in the cases where x will not equal y, where people think outside of the box and dare to challenge preconceived thoughts. I feel that Reed does just that. When I visited campus I heard multiple times that the students that go here are there to learn because they love learning, not because want to recite facts. The Honor Principle strongly reflects this love for learning, along with the Senior Thesis.
Reed is a unique and exciting college experience. Discuss the reasons that you believe Reed would be an appropriate place to continue your education
Whenever I mention Reed College, I almost always hear the name Steve Jobs after. As in, Steve Jobs went there, or Steve Jobs dropped out of there, or more likely, Steve Jobs invented Macintosh's interface there. While the presence of Steve Jobs adds more prestige to the college, or any college, the funny thing is that I really do not care. To me, he was just another creative student that happened to be a part of the Reed community for a while; a community I hope to join next fall.
Coming from a rural high school with a total school population of twenty, I knew that when I started applying to colleges my senior year I wanted something small. To go from having twenty peers to having twenty thousand peers would be both daunting and terrifying for me. I happened to stumble across Reed, with its total population of 1400 and I got excited. The fact that it also met my criteria of being a liberal arts school on the West Coast seemed to be fate. I tried not to get ahead of myself but the more I explored it, the more I fell in love.
It started with the Physical Education classes. The fact that I could take a white-water rafting or meditation course seemed so different, so much more fun, than the cut and dry classes I was used too. I knew it was ridiculous to base my college choice off of that alone, so I dug further. I discovered that while Creative Writing is offered, it doesn't fulfill any requirements, be it group or departmental. To me this meant that I would be in classes with people who really loved writing, the ones who chose to do it even if it wasn't going to get them closer to a degree. I also had the opportunity to sit in on one of the Poetry classes and I felt the same sense of closeness that I have experienced in my high school classes. This was due to the fact that instead of sitting in a large auditorium with three hundred students I was in a classroom with six others, sitting right next to the teacher. I have always loved this because I felt that the teacher got to know the students and did not just talk at their students, but taught them.
My high school has a program called Passages. These are six individually designed projects each student must complete to graduate. Each passage has a theme, ranging from Logical Inquiry to Adventure. Students have three mentors who work with them to help complete this: peer, adult and faculty. In addition, you must complete a set amount of hours to get credit and log all of those hours. Because of Passages I have been able to research what it would take to become a kindergarten teacher, and have gotten the opportunity to be a teacher's assistant in our local elementary school. I have also gotten the chance to explore my interest in creative writing by attending a three-week intensive at Sarah Lawrence College, in Bronxville New York. This led me to self-publish a book of my own work with the assistance of best selling author Carolyn Cooke.
What I have developed because of Passages that sets me apart from many other high school students are well-developed independent thinking and self-motivational skills. I don't accept cut and dry education, where you learn definitions from a mass produced textbook. In many ways that isn't so much as learning as conforming to a tired curriculum, where a x will always equal y. I'm interested in the cases where x will not equal y, where people think outside of the box and dare to challenge preconceived thoughts. I feel that Reed does just that. When I visited campus I heard multiple times that the students that go here are there to learn because they love learning, not because want to recite facts. The Honor Principle strongly reflects this love for learning, along with the Senior Thesis.