To quote my good friend Lasco: "You can take the boy out of high school, but you can’t take high school out of the boy."
That essay is a sure way to get rejected from every single college/university you apply to, including community/jr colleges.
Grow up.
You don’t know everything.
In fact, you don’t know anything, at least not anything actually worth knowing.
You might also want to alter the document that you are showing us since it has your real name and also your SSN.
Okay, I didn’t get the arrogant tone every one else seems to see. I got it as kind of playful. A little smart ass, but an acceptance of that, a nod to every one’s self centeredness. Everyone is a great driver. Everyone is smart. I got a huge sense of “nudge-nudge-wink-wink” with it. Maybe I’ve listened to “Don’t Throw Your Barbie Dolls in the Ocean” one to many times.
HC, I’d save this one for a McSweeney’s submission, and come up with something a tad less threatening and narcissistic for the admissions junta. You have time (I hope)…
Good luck!
I just thought of an approach: mock the conventions of modern marketing “branding” gurus to synopsize yourself as a “brand”. (You may wish to make it explicitly clear to them that you have no interest in marketing or business-related majors; or if that’s your interest, I suppose, so much the better.)
I’m having trouble fathoming why it received an “A” in class…
I would certainly not submit it if I were you. The people reading the essays have probably read two thousand of them this week. Of those two thousand, I’d bet that at least two hundred were by students who decided they’d try a “different approach” by being sarcastic or off-the-wall. The result is two hundred people who attempted to stick out in a crowd but are instead becoming part of another crowd.
Steve take your name off your paper, and your SS # like the good folks here have told you to. For someone who is so perfect that is a pretty stupid thing to do.
Brutal honesty is not what is important, getting into college is.
Rhum Runner’s Rule #1 for getting into College: Do no harm. It was said above, but I’ll say it again, in most cases the essays are more capable of doing harm than good. Admissions folks have to look at thousands of these things, I doubt they pay much attention if you do a decent job. Write something pedestrian and competent and be done with it. Maybe, if you are applying to some school you have no real hope of getting into, send the ‘individual’ essay and hope to get noticed.
Rhum Runner’s Rule #1 for being successful in college: For the next four years of your life, it doesn’t matter what you think. Your opinions are not important (unless you are asked for them). What is important is performing well in class. If the prof. says the sky is red, then on the exam you better damn well write “the sky is red” even if you, being perfect and all, think it is blue. Get over yourself, you aren’t that special.
<sigh>
The problem with the essay is that it’s nothing new. Trust me, Holden, everyone with half a brain comes to the same conclusion you did at some point in their mid- to late-teen years. That is, that you yourself are pretty damn smart, and you’re honest, too, and that you have a lot of stuff figured out even though you’re still young. It’s a stage.
Another stage you get to sometime in your mid to late twenties (or even thirties) is that you figure out that you didn’t, after all, have it all figured out in your teens. You might be smart, but there’s smarties all around you. Yeah, there’s dumbasses, but there’s also really, really smart people around you. People who, in the same circumstances you’re in, do better than you. People who figure things out faster than you. Etc. etc.
I’m guessing most colleges get your essay in one form or another from a significant number of applicants; after all, it’s the smarties who are usually applying to universities. I don’t think it would maek you stand out at all, and at worst, it would give the impression that you’re an arrogant bastard. I wouldn’t send it.
I think that it would be an error in judgment to send this to a competitive school, a school which only accepts perhaps 10-15% of its applicants per year. An admissions officer might smile a little at your bravado, but after he has reviewed the applications of thousands of essentially equivalent students, he might realize that since you are always right, it won’t really matter where you go to school.
I do not think this piece indicates that you are a “good fit” anywhere. If thinking that you have somehow bucked the system or demonstrated your individualism unlike the thousands of other elitist sheep applying to competitive schools keeps you warm at night, well, do whatever it takes. But if getting into college is your objective, more coherence, development of thought, and restraint are in order.
You should not use this paper because it does not demonstrate that you have any real essay-writing ability. Your spelling and grammar seem fine, but a good essay (even a humorous or satirical one) should have a clear thesis with support and development. Perhaps this truly is the “most honest” thing you could write, but I doubt it is the best essay you could write – and if it is, you probably wouldn’t be very successful in college anyway.