Essay-M

Essay-M You know, a while ago, Mitra did an entry on how to write a winning MIT application essay. I figure its getting to be around crunch time for you regular applicants to start writing your essays for all of your colleges, so I thought Id offer you a little advice of my own. More specifically, Im going to lead by example by posting some of my own writing. Also, Ive gotten comments from high school juniors and sophomores, so I know that not every single person who reads this blog is necessarily applying to MIT this year. In this vein, I thought Id post some of my old writing samples so you can gauge your own level of writing against mine. As luck would have it, my high school made us submit a district writing sample each year to make sure our writing skills were progressing adequately. They filed all of them in one big blue folder, with no indication that any of them had ever been read, and kind of arbitrarily gave them back to us upon our graduation. While being nostalgic this evening, I rediscovered all of them in my closet. So, here goes. I wrote this first one in fifth grade about my future aspirations. Now, you cant argue about the first sentence coming true, and the last one still more or less applies, but the rest has changed, uh, quite a bit since I wrote it. Id say that your application essay for MIT should probably use a little more varied sentence structurenotice how pretty much every single sentence begins with I. Theres nothing else as wonderful as I when youre describing yourself in an application essay, but some coordinating conjunctions and prepositional phrases are always nice too. When I Grow Up When I grow up, I will get good schooling. I will go to college for six years, get my Masters Degree, and become a teacher. Ill go to Penn State. I hope to have an A average. I will move to Washington, D.C., probably in my early twenties, and buy a normal, two-story house. I will be humble. Everybody says they will be a billionare [sic], but not me. I will also not use drugs. I may not even buy a car. If I do, it will probably be a Saturn, preferrably [sic] red. My job will be a teacher. I will go to meetings to learn how to be a better teacher. I will relate life to teaching to help the kids. I will make an average salary and probably not earn much extra money on the side. I will buy a great dane, and call him Buffalo. I will marry around thirty. My wife will probably the same age as me [sic]. I will tell her she may have any job she wants. It really doesnt matter if we have kids, although Id like a boy. Ill do a lot of cooking to save her the trouble. I might get a weekend cooking show for a month or so. It will be the only extra money I earn. I will be like Graham Kerr. I will cook only main dishes. This is what I plan to do when I grow up. I will be very humble, but I dont care. To me, money isnt needed. I just want to be happy Heres what I submitted in third grade. This one is in the most hilarious cursive you have ever seen. I honestly dont even remember how to write in cursive anymore, and dont know how I managed it from third through sixth grade. If they made you write college applications in cursive, I would probably be a starving artist right now. The prompt for this essay was to write a letter to your mother. Now, Im not really in the know, but I think Marilee Jones would be quite pleased if you used that as an essay prompt. Shes of the compassionate sort. Heres what Sams Mom received over ten years ago: Dear Mom, On Mothers Day I plan to cook you dinner after coming home early. Then Ill give you flowers and 2 more presents. Ill use the money from my own bank. I dont know what your favorite dinner is, so Ill just cook PB+J. NOT! I liked it when we went to Niagara Falls. Are you going to take me to New York this year? If you do, Id love to drop a penny off the Empire State Buildings roof! It would be fun to go somewhere on a plane. How about Colorado? Japan might be nice. Or maybe just the seashore again. Sincerely, Sam I kind of regret not ending this letter to my mother Love, Sam. But what can you do? For those interested, Sams Mom took me to New York for the first time four years later to see Lucy Lawless in Grease. I didnt get on a plane for the first time until two years after that. Boy, did I have some imagination which, as it turns out, is the central theme of this next piece from second grade: Behind the Couch I like to go behind the couch. It is comfortable and very dusty. I like that. When I go back there I could be mad. If Im mad, Ill smack my stuffed animals. I could be sad. If Im sad Ill cry. or I might go back there to hug my animals. I imagine things. It is so good for imagining behind the couch. I sneeze behind the couch. It is so dusty behind the couch. Well, I guess I covered why I like it. This is not my most impressive writing sample from the second grade; Sams Mom has always been dazzled by a poem in which I used the word azure. She thought it was because I was really advanced for my age, but actually its just because I saw it while playing Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (theres a level called Azure Lake). The moral of the story is to let your children play Sonic the Hedgehog 3 if you want them to stand any chance of getting into MIT. This will also help them understand certain receptor pathways in 7.06. And finally, to round off my elementary school experience, heres a literary analysis of Peter Rabbit from first grade. Peter Rabbit had problems. His mother said Dont go into the garden, your dad had an accident there. But Peter went. He ate cucumbers and parsley. He saw Mr. MacGregor and ran frantically. Things couldnt get much worse Because he forgot the way out! He ran north, south, east and west! He finnally [sic] found the gate and ran home. But he hated his medicine. Everything from sixth grade on is just more boring literary analyses of dumb poetry, Julius Caesar, Winesburg, Ohio, and other unmentionables. Surely that wont be of any use in helping you express the essence of yourself to the admissions office. I actually think something like Behind the Couch would be a great place to startit could just use some syntax work, a little more vivid diction, and maybe 450 or so more words BAM! Instant essay! Okay, if you have any more questions about how to be a good writer you could e-mail somebody from the MIT Writing Center, I guess. Thats what I do when I have a problem with an essay. Or, once again, you can consult Mitra. That is actually always the best option when confronted with any problem.