Michelle Talmor | January 15, 2009

"Relax, guys, it's just an essay!"

You know, out of all the words in the English language, I never thought the word “Essay” would cause young adults all over the globe to tremble in fear. I mean, it’s just a bunch of words, organized into a few paragraphs and co-existing on the same piece of paper, electronic or otherwise…

Of course, those words have to number 500 or less and also have to perform the extraordinary feat of showing the guys over at the admissions office precisely who and what you are. That is pretty scary…

Yeah, I’ll admit it - I was pretty terrified of the application essay myself, early on.

It bothered me night and day. I kept asking myself questions like “Should I use a quote?”, “Should I reference some work of art or literature?” and the ever famous “How could I make myself look just as special as that kid from Tibet who lived with his parents, 16 aunts and uncles, aging grandma and a goat in a 2x2 hut before realizing his dream was to be a mathematician?“

I was stumped.

And then, I asked myself the following question – “Could I possibly lie on my essay, and get away with it?”

After all, wouldn’t that be the perfect solution to all my woes? I am, when all is said and done, pretty average on all fronts. I’m certainly not any more special than all the other young folk applying to MIT alongside me, especially that Tibetan dude.

I therefore wrote a perfect essay, of exactly 500 words, about how my life was all an act.

I wrote about my true, secret life as the forbidden love child of Spider-Man and Michelle Pfeifer. I described how hard it was to hide my super powers from my colleagues and how I had to change my beautiful, but easily recognizable face with a magical glamor bought from the Faerie Folk, to make me look like any average Jane. I added a few notes about how I saved the world from the evil Shark-Men from sunken Atlantis during my lunch break last year and voila! An intelligent, witty and heart-breaking essay!

…So I embellished the truth a little. They wouldn’t notice, right?

Well, after I managed to put that gory task behind me, I turned to the rest of my application, patted myself on the back and considered myself done with any and all things named “essay”.

…Of course, I just had to re-read the thing a couple of hours before the deadline, just to make sure it was the correct file, with the correct version – OMG-ROFLMAO-BBQ-ESSAY.doc, version 32.104, FYI – so that I wouldn’t be making an ass of myself by sending them my shopping list by mistake, or my other essay about how much I just adore Georgia Tech, or anything like that.

Well, lo and behold, I re-read it and… I hated it!

It was awful! The writing was forced, I made so many versions of it and cut off so many parts that it was completely unrecognizable from what I originally planned and, worst of all, it had two spelling mistakes and a missed comma!

The horror!

I was so shocked, dismayed and disgusted that I deleted it and all it’s versions from my hard drive… And then I realized I had less than 2 hours to send something in and I had just completely, irrecoverably deleted any vestige of effort I had done so far for that purpose.

…AAAAAAAHHHHHHH!

Ahem.

So I sat myself down, grim-faced and determined, in front of a new, empty Word page and wrote a better essay.

It was still intelligent, it still had some heart-breaking bits in it, despite mostly describing my average, normal life, but my unique personality shone through it loud and clear. It was a tad too long, at 579 words, a tad too meandering and certainly didn’t have as many jokes or witty quotes as the previous one did… but it was all, 100% me!

I called it - “An average day in the life of an average, young queen in the Ursa Major hive colony”.

…Do you guys think that MIT gives financial aid to intergalactic royals?

((For the record, this is just an amusing, fictional story that'll hopefully help ease the stress we all feel about our essays. Good luck with your applications, everyone!))

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