Telling your story

I was at the post office, about to mail in my college application, when I remembered that I hadn't filled in my essay response to the question asking why I wanted to attend that university.  I walked over to the stand, picked up a pen secured against theft by a chain, and wrote something off the top of my head. 

Those days are long gone.  Today, the college essay is an art form.  College hopefuls pay large fees for seminars advising them how to compose the essay.  The less scrupulous hire ghost writers.

The New York Times each year asks for essays submitted as part of college applications that addressed "money, work, or social class."  Today's issue printed four of those essays, essays which I'm sure the newspaper ensured had actually been written by their student authors.  I am impressed not only by the formal excellence of their writing, but by the seriousness and sensitivity of the personal histories discussed, and each writer's self-awareness of how those histories have impacted their own lives and ambitions.  I would happily have read a much longer autobiographical article by each writer, expanding on his short application essay.

Zoë writes about what it was like to attend prep school at Andover on a full scholarship, after she had attended an ordinary public middle school.  She uses the contrast between the cheap laptop she was provided and the top-of-the line devices used by her much wealthier classmates as a symbol of the many class differences she encountered.  She sees how straddling both worlds has made her a person better able to function in varied environments.  "Maybe I'm culturally ambidextrous, as comfortable introducing a speaker on the stage of Andover's century-old chapel as getting my nose pierced in a tattoo parlor in New Haven."

Jonathan is the son of immigrants from Moldova.  He grew up accompanying his mother while she cleaned and vacuumed for a university professor.  He longed for the life led by the unseen professor's family: "the lightly crinkled New York Times sprawled on the kitchen table, the overturned, half-opened books in their overflowing personal library, the TV consistently left on the National Geographic channel."  He came to realize, enjoying their house while his mother worked, that one could work with one's mind as well as with one's body.  He is grateful for his mother's support: "It's her blue Hoover vacuums that hold up the framework of my life.  Someday, I hope my diploma can  hold up the framework of hers."

Caitlin's parents ran a bed and breakfast, and she became well aware that some guests were kind and others were unreasonable and demanding.  She admired her parents' ability to remain calm and gracious under great pressure, "capable of tolerating any type of cruelty with a smile."  She concludes,  based on her observations of her parents' relations with their paid guests, that "learning to serve people looks a lot like learning to trust them."

And Tillena split her time growing up between a mother who lived in a prosperous Flagstaff neighborhood and a father who lived on the Navajo reservation.  "I straddle the innocence of my youth and the mystery of my adult life.  That, too, is a precipice.  I know I must leap into adulthood and leave the balancing act of Flagstaff life behind.  Still, I belong at the place where opposites merge in a lumpy heap of beautiful contradictions.  I crave the experiences only found at the edge."

When I finally reached the university (to which I'd applied so cavalierly), I was assigned to honors English -- not on the basis of my scribbled application essay, certainly, but based on my SAT verbal score.  To my shock, I received a C minus on each of my first two English papers.  In part, I now realize, this was boot camp shock treatment for overconfident freshman.  But in part it was also because of something that my instructor carefully explained in writing on one of my papers.

He told me that my writing style was fine -- "felicitous," was his adjective -- but that I consistently fell back on vague and useless abstractions.  Write about what you really know, from your own experience, he told me.  Don't write about half-baked ideas you've picked up from reading books.

Each of the four students whose essays appeared in the Times clearly understood the importance of writing from your heart about those matters that have touched your heart.  Each told us about experiences that shaped his childhood, and each made a serious effort to draw conclusions about the future from those experiences.  As a result, their essays made favorable impacts on college admission officials.  As Barnard's dean of enrollment told the Times, "I wanted to have a conversation with her about it.  And I love leaving an essay like that, where you want to say, 'Let's keep talking.'"

When I wrote those first couple of English essays -- earning my C minus grades -- I'm sure I felt I simply had nothing interesting to say.  I wasn't the child of immigrants, I'd never lived on a reservation, I certainly had never attended a prep school.  I'd grown up in a very boring logging town in the Northwest Corner -- and my dad wasn't even a logger!  I'd gotten good grades.  I'd stayed out of trouble.  Nothing much exciting had ever happened to me.

I guess I felt I really didn't have a story to tell. But everyone has a story to tell.  Writing is an exercise in making that story as interesting to others as it is -- secretly, perhaps -- to yourself.  My mom, like Jonathan's, also vacuumed.  It just took me a while to appreciate that even such simple activities -- when seen as having had an impact on your emotions and on your life -- can be made interesting.

My later English papers got higher grades than C minus.