College essays that made a difference - Princeton Review 2010
Katharine Anne Thomas
The applicants
Katharine was a four-year varsity tennis player. She was the number-two player on her team her junior and senior years and co-MVP her senior year. During her final year of high school she took two 200-level English courses at Franklin and Marshall College. In addition to community volunteer work during the scholastic year, she participated in a month-long volunteer program teaching English abroad in Poland during the summers of her sophomore and junior years. She won several Scholastic Writing Awards and won a first-place Gold Key award in the Short Short Story category her freshman year.
Stats
SAT: 1390 (740 Critical Reading, 650 Math)
SAT Subject Test(s): 710 Literature, 680 Math Level 1, 620 Math Level 2, 660 French
High School GPA: 4.15
High School: Lancaster Catholic High School, Lancaster, PA
Hometown: Lancaster, PA
Gender: Female
Race: Caucasian
Applied to
Bucknell University
Colgate University
Emory University
Georgetown University
Haverford College
Johns Hopkins University
Swarthmore College
Vassar College
Wake Forest University
Yale University
Essay
Katharine used the following essay in each of her applications.
Common Application: Topic of your choice.
My first real college writing assignment: five neat pages of argument and examples, insightful prose in black type and white space where my professor could write little words of praise. I replayed a little daydream I had developed of him reading the paper, pausing and nodding at the particularly insightful points, scribbling excitedly in the margins and finally closing it with a satisfied sigh. The reason I was looking forward to getting my work back was not that I truly believed it was a work of genius. My sleep-deprived, bleary-eyed misery refused to let me be a fan of my work. At that point I was cursing the uncountable nights of rubbing my temples in the unforgiving glow of the computer screen I had spent on it. Instead, my prediction was based on precedent (not to mention each aching bone’s demand for restitution). Teacher’s responses to my work had always been positive, and I grew increasingly confident about my ability. But in the process, my purpose in writing shifted from self expression as it should be in its purest form and instead to gaining recognition.
Upon reading the paper, my professor suggested that I take a second look at it. His comments clarified ideas that had always been beyond my grasp. So many of my papers with similarly obscured errors had gone without being criticized, but, strangely enough, no red-inked “Fantastic!” was nearly as gratifying as having my own vague sense of flaw verified. While other teachers’ compliments had been flattering, what I appreciated more than anything, and what I would require to become any better in my craft, was a healthy dose of criticism. I realized that being selective enough in choosing my words would ensure that my ideas would never be misunderstood.
Envisioning the images that words have the power to create restored my passion for writing. What had made me love writing initially was the gloriously specific nature of words that enables them to provoke the exact response we intended them to and convey the most complex of emotions more so than any other outlet. Had I meant that Catholicism pervaded Irish tradition or was the religion embedded within culture? Did Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus stray from the church or lose his faith? If there hadn’t been a deadline I could have worked on that paper for weeks, editing day and night and probably still not being fully satisfied. I was at fault for having the haughtiness that led me to believe that I manipulated words, when in fact the opposite is true. Their role as the messenger of thought demands reverence. Words are for me what shapes and colors are for artists, what notes and beats are for musicians. But the medium by which we choose to express ourselves has little bearing; it need only fulfill its purpose. I gained from this experience a realization that I cannot be above laws that govern mankind’s communication. The ability of words to touch one’s core is timeless and beyond our grasp.
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