I want to thank you first for spending your time and reading this essay! I also have a quick question: do you think in this essay the admission officer is expecting me to refer more to Swarthmore? I just made this one completely personal, because there is another essay that asks specifically "why swarthmore."
prompt: Swarthmore's residential liberal arts community is shaped by its intellectually and culturally vibrant members, who come together to learn and grow through their shared and unique experiences. Briefly discuss how your academic and life experiences would inform, affect, and strengthen our community of thinkers. (500 word limit)
As I grew up, I observed the world through the lens of a writer. In middle school, I was the rebellious kid in school; I stayed up playing computer games, never did my homework, and screwed up all of my assessments. In 8th grade, the 2008 global economic crisis hit, and my mother's steel company went into bankruptcy. She fell into a depression that took years to recover, yet in the midst of that winter I offered her no help. To escape my family's daily struggles, I started blogging and buried myself in my limited observations of the world around me.
Upon graduating from middle school in China, I went to study in Wisconsin Lutheran High School. The struggle of being away from home was, however, grueling. One day after school, my host mom forgot to pick me up, leaving me in the 30 - degree weather for nearly an hour. That night I sat down in front of my laptop and updated my blog. I angrily pounded my keyboards, for I could not drop that feeling of abandonment. ". . . But she also looked rather fatigue, and just had her nurse night shift the day before," I paused, and went back and deleted the previous paragraph, the angry me. In writing I make peace with myself; I keep exploring so from the negative self I can grow a new one, one that is more astute, more introspective, more genuine.
Writing also teaches me to look bigger and think deeper into my surrounding environment. The other day I watched the movie About Time, which led me to consider the fluidity of time. "So if time is a four-dimensional axis," I later wrote in my blog, "is every moment of our life a little cube, placed on the axis of time that traverses through the past and the future?" Indeed it's not only the idea of time, but also how we view time, that fascinates me. "As the watches and clocks become more accurate, we always hurry to catch the right time mark. Is time itself or are the people themselves responsible for the constant hustle?" I never cease to ponder when I write.
Thus writing for me is both peaceful and stirring. It is the best combination of thoughts and feelings, and of rationality and spontaneity. When I arrive at Swarthmore, I will bring the writer in me - the one who carefully observes how people of various races and ethnicities socialize, the one who loudly criticizes reality TV shows through a feminist perspective, the one who writes love letters to people, friends and strangers alike, in her life. I will bring to Swarthmore part of the whole, the future class of 2018, a part that's named Amber only.
This is where the meat of your essay should lie. Overall, this is not a bad essay, just not as strong as it should be. You focus too much of this essay on building up to how you are a great writer, but the real prompt here is how will you contribute to the Swarthmore community. Develop this story further by showing how you will utilize your experiences to give back to the community at Swarthmore both inside the classroom and around campus. -Admissions Advice Online
