Freshman Admissions

Freshman Admissions This sense of clarity I received, was due in part to Pride and Prejudice because even though it did not provide me with the answers to my questions, it had given me a sense of self awareness. The notion that prejudice clouds perception was a truth that I don’t imagine I’d have come to as early without the help of Austen and it made me wonder how much more I could learn from reading. After that I became obsessed with reading, falling into my old habits of staying up late to read the last chapter, staying in to read at lunch, and going to the library every weekend. I am forever grateful to Pride and Prejudice for reigniting the passion for reading I had lost in middle school. The move to Texas was one of the hardest transitions in my life as I was greeted with a culture shock and had to reinvent myself. Before I had defined this connection as one of my most important values, I experimented with various methods of separation. In bursts of inspiration I would “homeschool” myself, withdrawing into seclusion. I liked to learn by tinkering and building things. At 12 years old, I tried my hand at homesteading. I read books about agriculture, built a chicken coop and a garden, and even slept outside in my family’s field. Not one of the book’s characters can be defined in terms of “good” and “evil,” or “right” and “wrong.” Rather, they are all unequivocally human, for better or for worse. The one absolute truth to our existence is the divide between life and deathâ€"and, some may argue that death is the only cessation of our humanity. Until recently, I felt little obligation to involve myself in any substantive way with humanity as a whole. There’s no one right thing to say in an essay, but these Johnnies may be a source of inspiration. In addition to reading it aloud, you can also try copying and pasting it into Google Translate. In trying to cultivate my own separate reality, concerned predominantly with my own experience, I became drained and depressed. Check out successful essays from current Johnnies. In California my peers and I had shared the same views. We were all so liberal which at the time felt like a blessing, but when I got to Texas it seemed as though everywhere I went my ideas were challenged. On an almost daily basis I was asked to defend my views on a subject, but my debating skills were limited to logical fallacies and ad hominem attacks so I wasn’t too successful. In my eyes it didn’t matter what I said because I was right and they were wrong. The Book Thief refuses to flee from this ambiguity. Hearing your essay emphasizes any mistakes that may have crept through. There is a strange distinction between reading on your computer and reading on paper. You have gone through theâ€"often gruelingâ€"process of crafting a competitive admission essay. Now that you have completed your edits, revisions, and rewrites, conduct your final review. For the final review, focus on formatting, spelling and grammar, and punctuation. A mixed metaphor, the use of multiples metaphors at a single time, detracts from the narrative. Likewise, dissimilar metaphors used in rapid succession confuse the reader. One of the most important qualities/values selective colleges look for in an applicant is curiosity. Read through your essay and look for opportunities to explore how your experience may be connected to historical, literary or philosophical ideas you care about. I found these methods of occupying my time to be more fulfilling than the types of entertainment, namely social media, being employed by those around me. On several occasions throughout my childhood, I decided to become a “scholar;” I would hole myself up with books that I couldn’t quite understand and pore over the pages until my eyes ached. Reading allowed me to feel connected with important ideas and values that were scarce in my surroundings. These endeavors were formative, and I do not regret them. However, in their extremity, they were defense mechanisms against the demands of the world, and they were not sustainable. Instead, the characters within its pages are mixtures of everything and its opposite. The story’s protagonist, Liesel Meminger, learns this lesson through her experiences in Nazi Germany, a place and time in which we are often inclined to believe that good and evil existed as separate entities. The Book Thief introduces a myriad cast of characters and thrusts them into the polarizing world of Nazi Germany.