“The common application essay was probably the hardest essay I ever wrote. Essentially, the assignment is, “Portray an aspect of your life in fewer than two pages.” Now this caused two huge challenges for me. First, “what did I want to portray about myself?” And secondly, “how can I portray that in 500 words?”
To start my search for an essay topic, I looked through my two older brothers’ college essays. After that, I went online and read some of the college essays on the Beaver Reader. Reading the essays helped, and I started to realize that every essay was unique. In fact, when interviewing at Connecticut College, I asked my interviewer if she had any advice on how to write a college essay, and she said that you should make your college essay as unique as possible. She described how if you wrote about a common event like a soccer game, you should really stress all the unique details about that one game.
With that in mind, I continued trying to find a topic to write about. Though I was very tempted to write about my community service trip to Senegal, I didn’t know how exactly I could summarize such an overwhelming and life changing experience. I also remembered that at a Tufts information session I went to last spring break the presenter gave a list of essays he hates to read through, one being the essay about how the prospective student went to a poverty filled country and became a new person from the experience. So, writing about Senegal was off the list.
On February 2, 2010 several hundred people gathered at Gobbler’s Knoll in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania while millions of other watched and listened to Punxsutawney Phil’s verdict for the rest of winter. The outcome was that there will be another six more weeks of winter. Many of you may be wondering, where did the origin of Groundhog Day begin? In the 1800s, Pennsylvania’s earliest settlers from Germany brought over their holiday, “Candlemas Day”. This holiday is celebrated on the second of February just as Groundhog Day by Germans and many other European countries such as Britain, where it is known as the Festival of Candles. It is celebrated as the the halfway point of winter. If the sun showed that day, then there would be an earlier spring and if it did not, winter would still be upon them for another six weeks.
