Please rip this apart! It is my common application essay and I need both grammar and content to be top notch. Thank you!
Describe a problem you've solved or a problem you'd like to solve. It can be an intellectual challenge, a research query, an ethical dilemma-anything that is of personal importance, no matter the scale. Explain its significance to you and what steps you took or could be taken to identify a solution.
Everything seemed to move in slow motion as water spread across my just-finished painting, like waves covering a beach shore. Please tell me that I am just imagining this. Internally, I was screaming as I saw my glorious piece of artwork being destroyed by the millisecond. On the outside, I was frozen with disbelief. I heard my friend exclaim my name, and that's when I snapped out of my thoughts and ran to grab a bunch of paper towels.
But, it was too late. The paper towels became soggy as it soaked up the water, but along with it, colors from the painting. I stared at the painting of my parrot, which was full of fiery reds, lush greens, and cobalt blues just a minute ago. Now, the water made the different colored paints bleed together into an unpleasant brown color, as if the parrot just partied in a mud bath.
In my head, I played over what had just happened -- I was excitedly gesturing as I finally finished the last brush stroke on my painting, and knocked over the entirely-full cup of water with my arm. I tried to laugh my spill disaster off, but there was still an upset feeling inside me as I looked at weeks of hard work seemingly destroyed.
"Are you still going to use it for the show?" my friend asked. Oh great, the school art show -- I suddenly remembered that the deadline to submit artwork is today. Restoring this painting was going to require a lot of speed and skill, and I didn't exactly have a plan laid out. However, I really wanted to display my hard work in the show.
"Yep," I hesitantly replied my friend.
I decided to stay after school that day to bring my painting back to its former glory. "Look, abstract art," I sarcastically joked to myself. Staring at the big blobs that were once miniscule details of feathers, wrinkles and lines, I didn't know where to start. How am I ever going to make this look better? Then, I realized it - I could play along to what the water spill did. Instead of trying to repaint my hyper-realistic parrot on top of the mess, I could play along with the blurred colors and movement of paint.
I gathered all my brushes -- fluffy and angled, round and flat --, squeezed out a rainbow of paint colors, and put in my earphones to tune out the world. I painted on fresh coats of hues and splattered paint to create more blobs. Slowly, the parrot began to come back to life in an abstract form.
I wish I could say my painting looked just as good as before, or even better. But, it didn't. Nor did it win any awards at the art show. And that's completely fine -- I still loved my slightly distressed, yet still vibrant and magnificent parrot. In fact, I was even more proud of myself and the amount of focus and determination it took to fix up the work within one busy afternoon.
That little accident was back in freshman year, but flash forward three years later, and the parrot painting is still hanging in my room. It's not up because of how beautiful it is or how many compliments it got. Rather, it is up to remind me that no matter what problem life throws at me, whether insignificant or life-changing, I need to stay calm, be confident, and put my mind into fixing it. Sure, I might not solve the problem perfectly. What matters, though, is that I put thought and effort to the best of my ability into it, such as the restoration of my parrot.
Oh, and I definitely make sure to keep water cups far away from me when painting now.
Holt Educational Consultant - / 14,818 
4780 This is quite a strong narrative essay in response to the prompt. However, it seems to start at the climax instead of at the beginning of the story. I would have liked to have read something about the background regarding the painting. What were you painting it for? Was it for a competition or an art class? Of course the importance of the painting after the accident is clear to the reader. But, what was the importance of this painting to you prior to the accident? The reason I ask is because you come across as calm and composed after the accident. So it would be interesting to know why your attitude was like that.
It would also be interesting to know if you react this way to all problems that come your way, or if you only reacted that way in this particular instance. Any comparison you can make to your reaction to similar problems prior to this one will create a clearer picture of you as a person and how you deal with problems. It makes you sound 3 dimensional in the narrative. Right now, there is just one character portrayed and it is not as interesting as I feel it can be.
