Friday, July 31, 2020

Essays That Worked

Essays That Worked Before the B, as in Beatrice, I was content to have my dad read to me until he fell asleep. I was in Kindergarten when I got my first Junie B. Jones book. I couldn’t read it by myself yet, and my dad was in the middle of the first Harry Potter book, so the pick checkered cover was put on a shelf. When I was six, we moved, and a box of my books turned up in my new room. My favorite protagonist and I grew up together until I moved on from the third grade, finally outgrowing that special connection. But reading the Junie B. Jones books taught me to connect in different ways with other texts. If you lived in a rural or lower-income urban area, there simply may not have been as many opportunities available for you to have a string of club memberships to submit in your application. Ultimately, human beings attend college, not test scores, transcripts, or resumes. Admissions officers know that the highest qualified students often hail from very similar backgrounds. Moreover, they understand that, while not just any student belongs in their program, the students who do belong in their program can come from anywhere. The Junie B. Jones series, by Barbara Park, was my real introduction to reading on my own. Be your wonderful, amazing self â€" idiosyncrasies, quirks, and all. The more real you are, the more intriguing you will be…and the more the admissions officers will love you. You must submit your application for admission before submitting your essay responses. college admissions, and I found my notes from the road trip I took with my daughter in 2011, the summer before she applied to college. Perhaps finances or other things restricted your ability to have the kinds of accomplishments that other students have. I collected the series, and when I finished with the ones I had, I reread them and begged for more. Before the series, I had no real interest in books. I loved stories, and I liked scribbling on pages and pretending to write books, but turning the pages of other people’s words never caught my attention. I don’t know what made Junie B. Jones so special. This double life that I live now is so different from what it was in the beginning, when I was a normal kindergartner, just like the heroine. It wasn’t like reading Plato, or studying Mark Twain, where I feel cultured and empowered, adventurous and brave. They are often enigmatic, surprising, or even confusing. For example, check out these 10 opening lines from Stanford admission essays. When you’re writing, open up and let your voice come through loud and clear. I enjoyed reading and discussing these works very much. St. John’s is appealing because I will get to read some of my favorite texts for a second time, as well as many new works. My favorite aspect of studying at St. John’s was the environment of free discussion. I love that teachers and students alike go by the simple formal address. This practice helps to foster an atmosphere of respect and equality in the classroom, giving students the confidence to take intellectual risks. I knew what to look for, what it felt like, and I desired to find that connection in other places. Junie opened my eyes to a world of possibilities, and saved my dad a neck cramp from sleeping at a weird angle. However, through my entire high school life, I was not allowed to have a conversation in classes. Being quiet was the unspoken rule of manner and etiquette, where the dominance of the teacher to teach and submission of student to learn by observation was naturally accepted by all members of every class. Not only that, for me, saying aloud my ideas helps me to better understand and clarify my thoughts, and thus myself. The students’ intellectual freedom lived on outside the classroom, inspiring our discussions of the readings over breakfast, during our afternoon free period, and during our evening group meetings. At seven o’clock the first evening, I was treated to my first seminar, and I fell in love with the school as well as its location. What excites me about St. John’s the most is that I have some previous exposure and that familiarity will improve both my understanding of these texts as well as my ability to discuss them. I have already read some of the books in the curriculum once, and so now I will be able to ‘read a book,’ during my second round of reading and discussion at St. John’s. My junior year in particular was my most interesting round of humanities. It focused entirely on Greek works, starting with Homer and the playwrights, transitioning into Thucydides, and then on to Plato and Aristotle.