Student story: Admissions essay about personal identity
About this video
A student, now an English major, explains she wrote about 16 drafts plus many abandoned ideas. One essay was about realising good writing is about communicating ideas, not big words; the other used an ugly 'I do calculus dress' as a symbol of learning to embrace being a nerd.
You'll be able to
- explain why revising many drafts can improve a personal essay.
- describe how an everyday object can become a metaphor for personal growth.
- explain how an essay topic can show academic interests to admissions readers.
Key words
- Draft
- A version of a piece of writing that you plan to improve.
- Metaphor/symbol
- Something concrete that stands for a bigger idea, like a dress standing for identity.
- Personal statement
- The main college essay where you share who you are.
Transcript
- So I wrote like 16 drafts of my papers. I thought long and hard about it. In addition to the 16 drafts or so there were about 10 other incomplete partial essays ideas I started writing and then completely abandoned. So I actually do remember what I wrote because some of the pieces of writing that I'm most proud of, partly because it was edited so many times, one of which was about my relationship to writing.
So I'm an English major now so I guess it's pretty fitting that I wrote about writing back when I was applying to colleges and basically how I came to terms that good writing isn't necessarily about using big words or anything like that, but it's actually about communicating ideas officially and kind of coming at it from a very political and like social justice angle if you can have that in English so I actually wrote about that for one of them.
It was very important for me to communicate to the admissions committee like what my academic interests were at the time. So I think that particular topic was a helpful way to be like I'm really interested in English and thinking about English functions as like a political tool.
So like that was what the first paper was about. The second paper was about, this is very silly. It sounds very silly saying it now, but I wrote about what I call the I do calculus dress. Funny I still remember this. The I do calculus dress was a dress that me and my friends saw at JCPenney that was super ugly and we had an ongoing joke that only people who do calculus would ever dare wear such an unfashionable thing and like the I do calculus dress in my paper ended up becoming sort of this metaphor symbol for how I kind of grew into my status as a nerd at my high school which is very uncommon and how I learned to stop being ashamed of the dress that fit me so well, but actually wear it proudly and be like,
yeah I'm a nerd and I'm okay with that and I'm okay with showing that off and flaunting that. So, again, this is also how I came to be comfortable with who I was and how I was intellectually stimulated and curious and that was a big part of me back then. So those are my personal statements.
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