This prompt is a little weird. So my essay is a little weird. It's got more voice to it than my normal college essays. It's more a personal narrative and less an essay. Do you think the style is appropriate for a supplemental essay or is it worth rewriting? Thanks for all your concrit in advance.
Prompt: Using the quotation below as a jumping off point, tell us about an event or experience that helped you define one of your values or changed how you approach the world:
''Some questions cannot be answered./ They become familiar weights in the hand,/ Round stones pulled from the pocket, unyielding and cool.''
-Jane Hirshfield, poet, Princeton Class of 1973
Essay:
I keep holding onto this irrational fear of leaving my home. It's December now, and I wonder where all the time went. I asked someone about a year ago, about where all the time in the summer had disappeared to, and he responded, "That way," pointing to the left. It was worth the laugh. But even now I still think about it. Why am I so afraid of time and change? Why am I so afraid of endings? It doesn't matter where the time went, but where the time is going. And the time is going away. Time is always going away, and it always moves forward. I wonder if I should too.
So all this insecurity has stayed with me throughout my senior year-that is until one random Saturday this month I spent with two of my friends. My high school holds a holiday party for a Brockton, MA elementary school each year. Seniors pair up in twos or threes and are assigned one or two grade school kids, whom they then get to splurge on by buying lots of holiday gifts. That Saturday, my friends and I went out to Target and then came back to my house to wrap gifts.
I don't have that great a skill of gift-wrapping, so the friend that did wrapped all the box-shaped gifts. That left me and my other friend to dream up some ingenious way to wrap a kickball. It goes without saying that round objects should not be wrapped in paper; any logical person would just stuff it in a gift bag and call it a day. Yet we didn't. We found a way to tape paper the entire way around the ball and then fold up the sides. After we were done, it looked rather horrible. We broke out laughing anyway.
In that moment when we were reveling in our (lack of) present-wrapping prestige, a huge wave of ridiculous joy surged within me. Here we were, guffawing at how awful we were at something, and suddenly I had reached a state of complete and utter contentment. There was something surely wrong with me.
Yet thinking about it afterwards, I realized something: I'm afraid of time's passage because I fear the loss of ridiculous moments such as that. But I kept thinking. I came understand-and this understanding was one of those lightening moments of enlightenment that rocks you to the core, you've got to comprehend that-that as time would always march forward, that moment in time would always stand still. It would stay me. No matter how far time had ventured, I could still experience the utter bliss of that second. Memories don't hold you back. They push you ahead and give you a little something of home to hold onto. Having that little golden nugget-though once it was a "cold and unyielding stone"-curled up in my back pocket, I know I can find the power to keep walking down the long road ahead.
Prompt: Using the quotation below as a jumping off point, tell us about an event or experience that helped you define one of your values or changed how you approach the world:
''Some questions cannot be answered./ They become familiar weights in the hand,/ Round stones pulled from the pocket, unyielding and cool.''
-Jane Hirshfield, poet, Princeton Class of 1973
Essay:
I keep holding onto this irrational fear of leaving my home. It's December now, and I wonder where all the time went. I asked someone about a year ago, about where all the time in the summer had disappeared to, and he responded, "That way," pointing to the left. It was worth the laugh. But even now I still think about it. Why am I so afraid of time and change? Why am I so afraid of endings? It doesn't matter where the time went, but where the time is going. And the time is going away. Time is always going away, and it always moves forward. I wonder if I should too.
So all this insecurity has stayed with me throughout my senior year-that is until one random Saturday this month I spent with two of my friends. My high school holds a holiday party for a Brockton, MA elementary school each year. Seniors pair up in twos or threes and are assigned one or two grade school kids, whom they then get to splurge on by buying lots of holiday gifts. That Saturday, my friends and I went out to Target and then came back to my house to wrap gifts.
I don't have that great a skill of gift-wrapping, so the friend that did wrapped all the box-shaped gifts. That left me and my other friend to dream up some ingenious way to wrap a kickball. It goes without saying that round objects should not be wrapped in paper; any logical person would just stuff it in a gift bag and call it a day. Yet we didn't. We found a way to tape paper the entire way around the ball and then fold up the sides. After we were done, it looked rather horrible. We broke out laughing anyway.
In that moment when we were reveling in our (lack of) present-wrapping prestige, a huge wave of ridiculous joy surged within me. Here we were, guffawing at how awful we were at something, and suddenly I had reached a state of complete and utter contentment. There was something surely wrong with me.
Yet thinking about it afterwards, I realized something: I'm afraid of time's passage because I fear the loss of ridiculous moments such as that. But I kept thinking. I came understand-and this understanding was one of those lightening moments of enlightenment that rocks you to the core, you've got to comprehend that-that as time would always march forward, that moment in time would always stand still. It would stay me. No matter how far time had ventured, I could still experience the utter bliss of that second. Memories don't hold you back. They push you ahead and give you a little something of home to hold onto. Having that little golden nugget-though once it was a "cold and unyielding stone"-curled up in my back pocket, I know I can find the power to keep walking down the long road ahead.