Modernization of a Hometown - Common App

So I have an idea for my common app essay.

I would like to write about an experience that fits into the common app question of "if you had the opportunity to bring any person -- past or present, fictional or nonfictional -- to a place that is special to you (your hometown or country, a favorite location, etc), who would you bring and why? Tell us what you would share with that person."

After I graduated high school, I briefly worked at a summer camp known as Camp Woodward. Some people may know it from the TV show. The camp is a summer camp for kids to train in gymnastics or other extreme sports such as skateboarding, rollerblading, biking, snowboarding, and skiing. However, this is no run of the mill summer camp, where it is Woodward brings in each sport's top athletes and olympians. This past summer, Shawn Johnson, Tony Hawk, Chris Cole, Frankie Morales and many more all made appearances during my work 2 month experience there. It was a tremendous honor and privilege to work alongside rollerblading's top professionals to directly give back to the sport I love by teaching kids how to skate and helping them grow as an athlete.

With all that being said, to attend this camp as a camper is one pretty penny. Sadly, many of my campers weren't all that passionate about rollerblading. Which leads me to my experience with a certain 15 year old camper who only wanted to sit in his cabin and play video games. He simply did not want anything to do with West Pennsylvania's beautiful outdoors. However, he was perfectly content at camp as long as he had his video games. When I suggested going to a rope swing over a pond on the edge of camp. He loudly rebuked something like, " I hate the outdoors! Just leave me alone!" And in an instance I was raptly captive to a memory of a much more simple time in my life

I thought about my time growing up in a lower-middle class neighborhood. It was a very simple place, just two streets that circled a pond. On that pond, I had a rope swing of my own. I missed that place where I could just escape the noisy century or just hide out from the decade. But Big business investors thought that my neighborhood could stand to be updated. Soon they forced it all into a grid until it looked like graphing pages. Now every trace of life there seems confined within a frame. Faces there move from day to day, but the houses all look the same. And finally it looks like everyone is trapped in this architecture of easy money. I don't live there anymore but i can only imagine the kids who populate those cookie cutter houses sitting in cars and waiting for their mom's to drive them out of that boring neighborhood. When I thought about it, there was rumor that it was called indian pond because it was once a burial place for native americans... I just wonder what they did with the "bodies".

Then I hope that my essay at this point can take a nonlinear approach by talking about the kid again.

I never did get that kid to do anything exciting. I just wish i could have showed him my neighborhood; the way I experienced it as a child.

Just as a reminder this is by no means my essay. Just the idea of it... only prolonged. I plan on polishing and shortening it up with a better vernacular. However, i feel as though a topic like this is a little exhausted.

DISCUSS!

Dan.

I am not sure that this is the direction you want to go in. Yes, this answers the prompt but from what you have written I don't see a real sense of emotion or why this person is important to you. The description of the camp, and the kid do not seem to correlate. As a reader, I did not understand why he was there or the connection you made with him.

Same Dan Brown that wrote the da vinci code? :-)


Boring! You must begin with a sentence that will intrigue any reader. I see that the essay is indeed interesting, but whenever you write anything it is important to attend to that first sentence. Make it a powerful sentence that can stand alone and give someone a cool experience on its own.

There is a lot wrong here:
With all that being said, t Strunk and White say, "Do not affect a breezy manner."
o attend this camp as a camper is one pretty penny.--I don't understand what this means. It costs a lot of money?

Sadly, many of my campers weren't all that passionate about rollerblading. ----I don't understand the logic of the sentences that precede this sentence.

Which leads me to It has to be part of the previous sentence if you start with "which"---> Sadly, many of my campers weren't all that passionate about rollerblading, whic h leads me to my experience with a certain 15 year-old camper who only ...

:-)