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My Common Application Essay

(this is still a work in progress, will add more later and update this post)

Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.

I’m going to come right out and say the one thing my application is incomplete without is something that is controversial in this day and age: being a Christian. I am a devoted, unashamed Christian, but I haven’t always been that way. This is the story of how I learned being Christian can be risky and how I became as strong as I am today.

I grew up in a Christian household. My parents are Christian, as are all my maternal family members. We’ve always gone to church year round, not just on the major holidays. I went to a private school for preschool and for first grade. I first accepted Jesus and was baptised when I was six years old. For most of my life I assumed that none of this was out of the ordinary. It didn’t really sink in that not everyone goes to church or believes in God until I was twelve.

Seventh grade was when I had my first real group of friends. In the years previous I had only ever had one or two friends at a time, and each year who those one or two people were changed. Because of this, I was extremely happy to finally have a large group of friends to call my own. These people influenced who I am today in many ways. They introduced me to a lot of my interests, such as Doctor Who, knitting, and anime. They also taught me new concepts, specifically about sexual orientation, gender identity, and other religions.

I’m not saying I didn’t know about any of those things before, of course I knew what it means to be gay and that there are other religions out there, but what they taught me is that it’s okay to explore, to see who you truly are inside and all that. Because they were into exploring, and they were my first real friends, I also got into exploring.

I spent that year really struggling with who I was and what I believed. I was always questioning everything about myself. Am I lesbian? Am I bisexual? Do I like her in a romantic way? Am I straight? Am I even truly a girl inside? And the big one: Am I Christian?

All my friends supported me, saying that could be whatever I wanted to be and that it doesn’t matter what my parents say, that I could believe whatever I wanted to believe – except for Christianity. When I came back to my roots and tried my best to follow God again, they all seemed to back off. I wasn’t shoving scripture down their throats, I wasn’t condemning them when they came out as bi or lesbian, I didn’t ignore or leave them, I just said “Hey guys, forget everything I’ve said in the past. I know that I am straight and Christian and this is what I am, what I believe.” After doing that, my friends stopped wanting to spend time with me. That was absolutely crushing to my little twelve year old heart. I wanted them to be my friends so badly that I went back to how I was before, struggling with my identity and not following God. The inner turmoil was so terrible that I even cut myself a few times. Always on the back of my left hand where my watch was so no one would notice.

I had realized that my faith was toxic to friendships, so I abandoned the very core of who I am in an attempt to make and keep friends, and by doing so I became someone I was not. I was completely and utterly broken inside. But, just like how broken bones become stronger once they’ve healed, I became stronger.

At the end of seventh grade, I thought I had it all figured out. I decided I was bi and that every religion allowed everyone to get into Heaven. At the start of summer, at my thirteenth birthday barbeque, I announced this to my entire family. My mother immediately took me inside and talked to me, telling me that she loved me no matter what, but that she wouldn’t be doing her job as a Christian mother if she didn’t tell me the Truth – the Truth being what the Bible says. As soon I as heard those words I knew she was right. I knew that I was broken inside and that I needed to be fixed, and the only one who could fix me was God Himself. No, she didn’t brainwash me, she didn’t force me to change my ways or anything like that. She just showed me Christ’s unconditional love, the love that I had always known before but never fully embraced, which is why I had fallen so, so far that year.

I spent that summer growing closer to God and my parents. We had a lot of long discussions – with each other, one on one, and with the pastor of our church – and we made sure to attend every church service. My mom gave me the James Avery ring I still wear today, a stainless steel ring with crosses on it, as a reminder to pray. That was my focus that summer, to build up my relationship with God by praying all day, every day. By the end of the summer, I was much, much closer to God and to my parents than I ever had been before. On my mom’s birthday that fall, November thirteenth, I was baptised for the second time, to show that I was really, truly born again. When I rose from the water that morning, I was a stronger daughter, a stronger Christian, and a stronger person.

Since then I have continued to grow in my walk of faith. I choose the TV shows I watch, the music I listen to, and the relationships I have with God in mind. I put God first in everything I do and say. It is very hard to keep God first in a world where devoted Christians are becoming rarer and rarer and less and less tolerated, but I know that as long as I have God and as long as I continue to show Christ’s love to others, I will be okay.

Toni Morrison Synthesis Essay

Question being explored: What is Morrison trying to convey or show the reader in this book?

Whenever one is exploring what an author is trying to convey in a piece of writing, one must look at the themes of the piece. There are several themes being explored in Beloved, but the main theme is how the characters dealt with slavery before and after they were freed.

Beloved is a book written in the 1980s by Nobel Peace prize winner and author Toni Morrison. The book is about a group of former slaves living in Ohio. The three main members of this group are Sethe, her daughter Denver, and Paul D. The story follows them through the time period of about one year, though there are a lot of flashbacks that are not clearly identified.

We begin with what the characters went through during their life as slaves. It is common knowledge that slaves were treated badly, but Beloved provides an inside look at the horrors these people faced. The hardships of slave life start at birth, for example, when Sethe was taken away from her mother and given to a wet nurse on the plantation. The nurse was also in charge of feeding the white babies, and of course they got fed first. As a result, Sethe did not get as much nourishment as the others. We see a similar situation with Baby Suggs, Sethe’s mother in law. Suggs had eight children, but all except her youngest were taken from her while they were still young, never more than a few years old. Mothers had to work until they gave birth, were expected to be in the fields again the next day, and many times were separated from their children. This was a common occurrence and knowledge. Coming back to the theme of the book, the characters dealt with this reality by just accepting it, much like how modern day people accept that slavery was an unacceptable practice. But Morrison goes deeper than just restating what is already known by showing all the sides we don’t know about.

Sweet Home is a plantation in Beloved where a group of male slaves work for a white man and wife. Sweet Home, as the name suggests, is a pleasant place, at least relative to other plantations. The slaves are treated with the sort of respect that is between an employer and employee  and are not unnecessarily punished. The story of Sweet Home was a nice one, until you read the details laid out in the book. Once the owner of the plantation died, matters got worse. A new man came in who was a more traditional slave owner. He beat the men and allowed the white boys on the plantation to sexually abuse Sethe. They did not rape her, instead they ‘took her milk’, as Sethe describes it. The slaves dealt with this new horror by running away. Sethe sent her boys and baby daughter away first, as she was heavily pregnant. Many slaves dealt with the terrible things this way. Once again common knowledge, but the way Morrison writes the story provides insight to the terrible happenings of slavery and the risks of running away that can not be found in textbooks.

It is pretty obvious how Morrison showed how slaves dealt with the things they experienced as it seems to be simple cause and effect. They got beat, they ran away. Most children got taken from their mothers, they mourn then accept it. But there were scars left from their time as slaves, scars of the physical and mental kind.

For Paul D., most of his scars were mental. He spent time in a terrible place, while never named it seemed to be a sort of mine. He and other men were shackled together and forced to dig in a trench. When they escaped, Paul D. found himself a stronger man than before, both physically and mentally. That experience taught him how mean the white man can be, and to not let himself ever be held down by anyone, which may be why once he escaped slavery he never stayed more than a few months in one place. Stamp Paid is another character who used his pain well. Stamp Paid was a former slave who helped other slaves escape, and even after they were freed he continued to help everyone he could. But not everyone handled their wounds the same way. Sethe is the main example of this. She went through waves of using her pain to make her stronger and allowing her pain to consume her. When she first escaped, for example, she went with her children to 124, the house where Baby Suggs lived. It was her two boys, her two girls, Baby Suggs, and a whole slew of other people who were constantly visiting. Sethe was a strong, single mother who did her share to help out. But when the slave catchers and schoolteacher came trotting down the road one day, Sethe went crazy and killed her older daughter. Her logic was that death was better than slavery. Her sons dealt with the tragedy by running away. The neighbors handled it by acting like they didn’t know her and stopped coming by. Sethe dealt with it by working her butt off to support herself, her daughter, and her mother-in-law once she got out of jail. For sixteen to eighteen years, Sethe went to work everyday and raised Denver on her own, waiting for her boys to come home. She was strong, even when Baby Suggs died and the ghost of the baby she killed began haunting 124. She was strong until Beloved came back to life and showed up at 124, and forced Sethe to face her past. As long as she didn’t have to deal with it directly, she was okay. But as soon as Sethe had to accept what she did, she crumpled under the weight of her actions.

And so it can be seen that there are many different ways the slaves dealt with what they went through, from becoming stronger to just accepting it to going insane. Considering how nearly every part of the book was about how the characters dealt with their tortured lives, it is easy to say that the meaning behind Beloved is that everyone has different ways of dealing and that it is not impossible to deal with the past. Hard, yes, but not impossible.

 

Bibliography

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987. Print.

“Essay on The Supernatural in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” 123HelpMe.com. 10 Apr 2016

Fowler, Doreen. “‘Nobody could make it alone’: fathers and boundaries in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” MELUS 36.2 (2011): 13+. General OneFile. Web. 8 Apr. 2016.

 

George, Sheldon. “Approaching the Thing of slavery: a Lacanian analysis of Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” African American Review 45.1-2 (2012): 115+. General OneFile. Web. 8 Apr. 2016.

 

Hichri, Asma. “Hunger ‘beyond appetite’: nurture dialectics in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” ARIEL44.2-3 (2013): 195+. General OneFile. Web. 8 Apr. 2016.
Wolfe, Joanna. “‘Ten minutes for seven letters’: song as key to narrative revision in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Narrative 12.3 (2004): 263+. General OneFile. Web. 8 Apr. 2016.

Assertion #8

After reading and watching “The Great Gatsby”, one can’t help but wholeheartedly agree with Charles Moore’s article titled “Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby: a faithful film – and a terrible, terribly bad one” The article talks about how while the movie did get all the details right, the theme, the message F. Scott Fitzgerald was trying to portray in the book did not make it over to the movie at all. There are several examples outlined in the article that support this.

The first example are all of Gatsby’s parties. In the movie, the parties are full of bright colors, loud music, lots of entertainers, the whole works. While that is how huge house parties thrown by rich people are expected to be described, the movie, as Moore says, made “the over-staged extravaganzas look like routines from an old-fashioned musical rather than an actual party with real, live, bad people in it.” Fitzgerald wrote the book as a satirical critic of the ‘American dream’ at that time, he would not portray the parties as fun, happy events. The party goers were newly rich men and women with empty lives. In the book, the parties are not described as enjoyable. They were just full of people getting drunk on free, illegal alcohol because they could.

The second example is of Gatsby’s yellow car. In the book, the yellow car is supposed to represent “the mixture of suavity and slight derangement” that was Gatsby’s personality. At first, he is a gentleman, but as the story goes on we see that he is, deep down, a madman. A stalker, to be more precise. And while his car reflected that in the book, the car in the movie, as Moore puts it, “reminds one more of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” The car is clunky, it’s a dastardly shade of yellow, and it is certainly ten times more comical than it is elegant or mad.

Admittedly, this last thing is not a specific example, but it is the most important reason why the movie was so terrible. Moore says this reason very clearly when he says “It aspires to make a great American film of a great American novel, but it does not locate itself observantly in the culture that fascinated and appalled Fitzgerald.” As stated earlier, Fitzgerald wrote “The Great Gatsby” as a critique of the American dream as that time period lived it. In the book, the characters are doing whatever they want, whatever they can in order to pursue their own happiness with complete disregard to the people around them. Tom is cheating on his wife with a married woman but won’t let his wife leave him, Gatsby has created some kind of illegal empire in order to get rich for a married woman he hasn’t seen in five years, Nick sees it all but doesn’t say or do anything because that it what’s easiest for him. All these characters actions reflect how the people of that time were living and are meant to show the readers who lived during that decade how childish, selfish, revolting they really were. All that is packed into the book, while the movie is just “about rich people behaving unpleasantly.” None of the satire, none of the disgust that Fitzgerald so cleverly hinted at yet screamed in the book is in the movie.

Yes, the movie has all the details from the book, from the exact dialogue, to the clothes to Gatsby knocking over the clock at Nick’s house, but the movie does not have the most important part of the book – the heart, the meaning behind it. That is why Charles Moore is absolutely correct when he says that Baz Luhrmann’s “The Great Gatsby” is a terribly, terribly bad movie.

And One Fine Morning…

One of the last lines of the last page of “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald essentially sums up the last five years of Gatsby’s life. The line is as follows: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And one fine morning-”  There are three perspectives from which it can be seen that the line sums up his life. From far away, from a reasonable distance, and up close. Each distance will show something different about the line and how it applies to Gatsby’s life.

From afar, the overarching ‘theme’ of the last five years of Gatsby’s life, essentially the belief or sentiment behind what Gatsby was doing during that time, can be seen. The theme or message is this: no matter how much hoping, dreaming and planning you do, not everything will play out the way you want it to. This moral can be inferred from the second part of the line, “It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…” The last five years of his life began with Gatsby falling in love with Daisy. After only a short amount of time, he is forced to leave her behind when he goes to war. Throughout their time apart, he dreams of seeing her again. When he came back from war, he made himself a good amount of money and bought a house across the bay from where she lived. He threw extravagant parties in the hopes that Daisy would one day wander in. “It eluded us then…” refers to how he lost Daisy when he went away. The rest of the line is parallel to how he tried to bring Daisy back into his life. He ran after her and reached out, but he never actually catch her. He did meet her again and spend some time with her, but she was never truly his. The dream Gatsby was chasing for those five years was that they would meet again, she would remember how she loved him, and then she would be with him forever. He ran after that dream, he stretched his arms out, but in the end, he never did truly catch that fleeting dream.

When we get a little closer to the situation, we see how much that dream consumed those last five years. This is evident in the first part of the last line on the last page, “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.” The green light being referred to is the green light at the end of the dock in front of Daisy’s house. Gatsby was captivated by that light, as it represented Daisy, especially how close yet far she was from him. He could see the light from her dock, he could see her house, but she had no idea if he was even alive. As time went on, with every year he gazed at that light, the chances of reconciling with Daisy grew ever smaller. “…the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.” With every year that passed, the “orgastic future” Gatsby imagined he would have with Daisy become less and less likely to happen. However, that did not mean he believed any less in the green light. If anything, he became even more obsessed.

Once we are uncomfortably close to Gatsby, we can see how all this was affecting his life. During the entirety of those last five years, he only thought of Daisy. He survived the war for Daisy, he became rich for Daisy, he bought his mansion for Daisy, every waking moment was spent thinking about or doing something for Daisy, and she had absolutely no idea. In the end, it was this obsession with doing anything and everything for her that spelled his demise. The last part of the line is “And one fine morning-” The line ends mid sentence to represent how suddenly death comes. For Gatsby, death really did come on a fine morning as well. After they were reunited, Daisy and Gatsby decided they would run away together. When they told Tom, Daisy’s husband, about this, things did not go well. They all drove home in a angry hurry. Daisy drove Gatsby’s car with the man himself, and on the way home she hit Tom’s mistress, Myrtle, killing her. Gatsby’s car was identified as the vehicle that ran her over, and thus Gatsby was thought to be the driver responsible. Gatsby never corrected anyone, he was ready and willing to take the fall for Daisy. He knew she would be happier with Tom than she would be in jail. Unfortunately, Gatsby never actually went to jail. Myrtle’s husband, crazy with grief, killed Gatsby. One fine morning, Gatsby was shot and killed. All because he was so obsessed with Daisy that he was willing to cover up murder for her.

The last line of the last page of “The Great Gatsby” sums up the last five years of Gatsby’s life by telling the theme that describes those years, the obsession that controlled those years, and the way those years ended.

Assertion #7

F. Scott Fitzgerald doesn’t just use the “show don’t tell” technique with Nick Carraway, he also uses it with his other characters, such as the great Gatsby himself.

Gatsby finally joins us in chapter three of the book. Previously  he had just been Nick’s neighbor, someone a lot of people have heard of but never really met. We meet him at one of his famous parties, one he invited Nick to.

He throws fabulous parties regularly and let’s anyone come into his house to have fun during these parties. However, he does on occasion invite specific people, and Gatsby inviting Nick is the first instance we have of Fitzgerald using “show don’t tell” to reveal Gatsby’s character to us. While he is okay with throwing huge parties in his house, he doesn’t view everyone the same, and he does take particular interest in specific people. His interest in his neighbor Nick led him to invite Carraway to the party, and at the party he invited Carraway to ride in his hydroplane with him the next day. This shows us that he is not some party animal who just throws parties to throw a party. He has some purpose in having parties – to meet interesting people (though the actual exact purpose isn’t revealed until later in the book). Another instance that shows us Gatsby isn’t a party animal is when Nick points out that Gatsby isn’t getting drunk with the rest of his guests, even though it was after midnight and even Nick, while not completely drunk, had had a few drinks.

What we have learned about Gatsby in this chapter is that he is a careful man (Nick points out that he seems to choose his words very carefully) who has more to him than he seems (Noone seems to know anything real about him). We learned this all through Fitzgerald using the “show don’t tell technique”, using Gatsby’s actions and the actions of those around him to show us who Gatsby is.

Assertion #6

F. Scott Fitzgerald uses the so-called ‘show don’t tell’ technique to develop the narrator of his novel titled “The Great Gatsby.”

This narrator is named Nick Carraway. He is Gatsby’s next door neighbor. Other than that and the fact that he lives in an area called the West Egg, everything we know about Nick we know from how he acts, what he says, what he thinks.

For example, in the first chapter we learn that Nick is now comfortable around rich people, because he is from a poor background. In the first chapter he is visiting his cousin Daisy, her husband Tom, and a woman named Miss Baker. A good, obvious example of Nick’s discomfort amongst these well-to-do people is this line on page 12 –

“You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy,” I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret. “Can’t you talk about crops or something?”

Throughout the first two chapters Fitzgerald uses the “show don’t tell” technique to continue to build Nick and reveal his character to the reader. An example of how Nick’s character is shown is in chapter two, when Nick is with Tom, Tom’s mistress Mrytle Wilson (who is married to a man named George Wilson), her sister Catherine, and their friends Mr. and Mrs. McKee. They are all drinking, which is something Nick doesn’t normally do, and we learn that from the line on page 19 –

I have been drunk just twice in my life, and the second time was that afternoon; so everything that happened has a dim, hazy cast over it, although after eight o’ clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun.

This shows Nick’s responsible, calm character because he lives in a time where everyone drank and got drunk regularly. In a society where it is normal to get drunk a lot, it must have taken lots of determination and will power for him to abstain from that, showing us what kind of person Nick is.

From these two examples, we can see that Fitzgerald really takes advantage of the “show don’t tell technique” and does a tremendous job of developing his characters, in this case Nick Carraway, through their actions, thoughts, and words.

Assertion #5

“A classic is never finished saying what it has to say.” – from ‘Why Read The Classics?’ by Halo Calvino

This quote was taken from “Why Read The Classics?” written by Halo (or Italo) Calvino in the early 1980s. Calvino was an Italian journalist who lived from 1928 to 1985.

This quote is one of the several possible definitions of what makes a book a classic that Calvino explores in the article.

Another way of saying what is being said in this quote is every time you read a book you learn something knew or get something different out of it. One good example of a book that does this is the Bible. Every time you read it, you realize or discover something new, and usually it is exactly what you need at that moment. An example Calvino uses is the Odyssey. Calvino says “…I cannot forget all that the adventures of Ulysses have come to mean in the course of the centuries..” Meaning that each time the story is read, it can have different interpretations or applications depending on what is going on during that time period.

What the quote is saying is one argument, but there is another argument that can be made. The second argument being made by Calvino with this quote is that one of the requirements for a book to be a classic is that each time you read it you learn something new. As this is one of several definitions of what makes a classic, it is also one of several arguments in the article. The entire article is really one big argument saying that each of these requirements is, well, a requirement for a book to be a classic.

Personal Profile: Micah Burnett

Micah Burnett walks into the classroom full of teenage girls. His eyes dart around the room, resting briefly on each face. Some girls are facing forwards, pen and journal ready in front of them. Others are whispering amongst themselves, phones in hand. Micah stands as a soldier should – back straight, feet forwards, hands by sides – at the front of the classroom. The teacher of the classroom introduces him and his veteran friend who also came, and the barrage of questions begins.

Micah Burnett was born into a family of military personnel. His family has always had soldiers in the army as far back as the 1400s. As a result, Micah grew up on military bases around the world. For the Burnett family, moving around a lot was perfectly normal. Growing up in different countries didn’t come without it’s perks – the entire family was exposed to different countries, and they learned how to maintain healthy long distance relationships with their friends from other countries. He grew up surrounded by the military, but he didn’t always want to be a part of the military.

He was going to school to become a scientist before he ever wanted to be in the military. Micah was all set to earn his degree when he had a revelation. He was in the lab with the scientist couple he was interning for. There were a few other people as well, each at a different stage in their life, in their science careers. Even though they were all different people seeking slightly different things, Micah could see that they were all living essentially the same life, and if he stayed in that field, Micah knew his life would be the same as theirs. He could see his entire life laid out ahead of him, and he wasn’t too fond of that. That was when Micah Burnett decided he would carry on the family legacy and join the army.

He wanted to join the Air Force, but instead joined the National Guard. There, he trained to become an Intelligence Analyst. Intelligence analysis is the process of taking known information about situations and entities of strategic, operational, or tactical importance, characterizing the known, and, with appropriate statements of probability, the future actions in those situations and by those entities. An Intelligence Analyst is a person who does just that. His first day doing that job in the field was on September 11, 2001. It was his first day in the office. Micah was just getting settled into his new workspace when the first plane hit it the World Trade Center. The whispers moved throughout the building – “What happened?” “Was it an accident?” “Is it an attack?” When the second plane crashed, everyone had their answer. Micah Burnett and other military personnel were taken to an undisclosed location to do some classified work. In a military attack, every hand is needed on deck.

Micah surveys the room once more. One hour has gone by since he walked into the classroom. By now, all the girls in the room are enraptured. Lots of interesting questions have been asked and the mood has lightened a little as everyone has become more comfortable. As it becomes time to leave, Micah lets himself smile a little. This has been an interesting experience for him.

Assertion #4

What can be done to ensure equality for all is a question most people ask themselves at one point or another. At least amongst Americans that is the case, seeing as to how our country was built upon the values of freedom and equality. I know that is the case for me. I’ve asked myself this question many times and I think I have an answer. In one sentence – to create equality for all we must all change our mindsets.

We can start by accepting that people are people no matter what. We should not feel threatened by people who are different from ourselves because they are just people too. That’s really all there is to it, once everyone can accept each other we will all see each other on equal grounds and we will be equal. To change people’s mindsets we just have to educate them. Star teaching children from a young age to see others as people no better or less than themselves. All schools and education centers, even colleges, should have free classes to educate the masses that prejudice is bad and we are all humans and should be treated as such.

Once everyone has been educated and their mindsets changed, a lot of good things would happen. Discriminatory laws would be be repealed because the people in the legislative system would see everyone as equals. Police brutality would stop because the policemen and policewomen would see everyone as equals. Bullying in schools would stop because the students would accept each other’s differences instead of make fun of them.

Maybe I’m being too optimistic, but one must admit that there is only a problem with equality because people don’t accept that everyone is different and equal because we are all humans. Once everyone can accept everyone else reaching total equality would be extremely easy.

Realistically, however, achieving any goal of total equality is impossible. There are just too many mean, terrible people in the world. We can do our best to get as close as we can total equality and we should do just that, but we shouldn’t feel bad when we don’t reach total equality.