I’m back now from the lovely week I spent in Provincetown. My sister brought her digital camera but only a 32 MB card; I’ll post photos to my photo gallery sometime later this week. What did I do for that week of beautiful weather?

I wrote essays. At least, parts of essays. My logic was that if I tackled essay-writing from a decentralized approach with different pieces of generally related themes, I would be able to use verbal glue afterwards and come out with a creative and worthwhile piece. I’ve seen patchwork quilts at the Museum of Fine Arts, so why can’t the same be true for personal essays? This plan didn’t work as well as I had hoped.

When I had finished writing a piece for the Exeter Review a few weeks ago, my mom warned me that I might be falling into a frame of mind which leaned too heavily towards “blog post” style writing. Short, light, witty–you know the drill. While I was writing college essays these words came back to haunt me. A 500 word essay is not particularly long at all, but it is long enough that a very clear progression / presentation is necessary.

This short format sometimes works against me, since I think broadly and quickly; disparate topics come together to me but it’s distracting to the reader to explain the connection between Wisconsin and Gene Wilder in a short space (Wisconsin is the nation’s #1 cranberry producer, cranberry-> blueberry -> Chocolate Factory + Willie Wonka -> Gene Wilder… See?). That’s why I need to calm my thinking down and focus specifically on what I’m trying to express about myself and then do so succinctly. These are personal essays, after all.

Which brings me to my next point: narcissism. That’s what I don’t want to convey through my essay (Thacker said that first-person essays and narcissism promote an air of narcissism throughout the entire application process; SFGate Aug 20).

On Saturday I was sitting at Herring Cove beach staring at my notebook, asking myself “What can I say that sounds authentic without appearing shamelessly self-promoting?” Appearing authentic is the secret to successful essay writing, but what part of me should I try to show readers? I’m not an “angular” student, but neither am I simply “well-rounded.” I prefer to think of myself as stellated–spiky, maybe. I am passionate about many things. Isn’t that better than being passionate about only one thing? That’s a subjective judgement call which will probably vary depending on particular college admissions officers. My conclusion was to try to record an anecdote which demonstrated my versatility and wide range of interests and skills.

Emphasis on “try” there–I haven’t gotten one that quite works yet. I was writing essays simultaneously for the Common App (option 6: Choose your own topic), UPenn, Brown, and Johns Hopkins. Why only those? Because those were the only things I had downloaded to my laptop. Still, because I wrote several variants of the would-be common app essay, I have more than enough to go around. Here are some of the topics I was thinking about, but didn’t really finish.

  • My love of knowledge and learning, as demonstrated by my affection for… knowledge and learning. Anecdotal.
  • Why I love interdisciplinary studies
  • What I have learned about life from my Golden Retriever, Cozmo
  • Lessons learned from my time in Workmen’s Circle Shule as an African-American Jew
  • The difference between cultural and intellectual diversity; compare Newton / Exeter

As you can see, none of these are immediately striking. That’s why I’m still working on them. Yikes.