College Admissions Essays: An Influential Person or Event

788 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Personal influence in life

An influential Person/event

It seemed like it would make her die, just speaking it. So I didn't tell anyone, not even my best friends. At school I would slip into a fantastical dreamland, nobody there knew that I should be troubled, pensive. I put on my best front and paraded around the school halls with some sort of smile plastered on my face. At lunchtime I'd stare at my food thinking that my friends should know. I thought of a million different ways to tell them. Each time that I came close to telling them, I would think about their potential reactions. There would be the normal lunchtime banter going on, complaints about the ranch dressing, and I would blurt out, "Hey guys, my mom has breast cancer." The whole cafeteria would turn silent and the plastic forks would drop from their hands, making a sad little clinking noise. Then I would stare at my food mentally kicking myself for having opened my mouth. I chose to say nothing. I remember very clearly the day that I went to go sit with her while she got her chemotherapy. I only did this once because it was too hard for me. I walked down an overly-lit sterile hallway trailing behind my dad. When we reached her room I wished that I could just keep walking, pretend I hadn't seen her. I went in and sat down. Her shirt was partially unbuttoned so that the IV could be inserted into the porto-cath surgically implanted under her collarbone. She was hooked up to three different kinds of poisons, and one normal IV. There were some knitting things spread across her lap and the ever present bag of lemon drops was faithfully at her side. Her head was laid back in the chair, she was tired. She and my dad tried to involve me in some nice chit-chat, I met and shook hands with the doctors and nurses, "It's nice to meet you Dr. McCoy." Yeah right. They complimented her on what a beautiful daughter she had. I blushed, smiled politely then excused myself to the bathroom. I wiped away my forming tears and gave myself a mental pep talk to be cheery. As long as I didn't look at her tired eyes I was OK. Half an hour later, she was done and we got to go home.

Show More
Related

  • Careful Manipulation in Coleridge's Kubla Khan

    1328 Words  | 3 Pages

    In his preface to "Kubla Khan," Samuel Taylor Coleridge makes the claim that his poem is a virtual recording of something given to him in a drug-induced reverie, "if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things . . . without any sensation or consciousness of effort." As spontaneous and as much a product of the unconscious or dreaming world as the poem might seem on first reading, however, it is also a finely structured, well wrought device that suggests the careful manipulation by the conscious mind.

    Read More

  • College Admissions Essay: The Power of the Mind and Spirit

    500 Words  | 1 Pages

    Confucius compares education to the sculpting of marble. He said, "Just as the sculptor is to the marble, so is education to the soul. It releases it. For only educated men are free men." I see college as an irreplaceable time in my life when I can begin my journey to find the freedom that Confucius so eloquently describes. While in college, I want my education to bring me face to face with the awesome power of the human spirit and the human mind working together to achieve the beautiful and the revolutionary.

    Read More

  • James Weldon Johnson

    669 Words  | 2 Pages

    Johnson's primary concerns were with the black writer. This included what the black author needs to know and what he must do in order to produce quality work. Johnson's ideas on blackness and the black author can be summarized in four statements: (1) black people have made significant contributions to American culture (2) black writers, to achieve thier best results, should treat black materials in their works (3) black people possess a unique racial spirit which can best be represented in literature by black writers, and (4) black w...

    Read More

  • College Admissions Essay: The Rocky Path

    255 Words  | 1 Pages

    Stricken with rickets, attention deficit disorder, a severed facial nerve, and being voted "most likely to end up in the electric chair" by his fifth grade class, this individual triumphed over many obstacles. As an aspiring writer and actor he was rejected as an extra in the film The Godfather and was persuaded to switch careers for more realistic goals. Sparks of genius were recognized in his script writing, but he was told only legitimate actors would have a chance at performing the title roles.

    Read More

  • College Admissions Essay: Woman of the Year

    540 Words  | 2 Pages

    "You have just been named the 2015 Man/Woman of the Year. For what achievement are you being honored, and how did your college education help you reach your goal?"

    Read More

  • Key Person Approach Essay

    1284 Words  | 3 Pages

    This essay will discuss the Key Person approach and its impact on children and their families. It will critically analyse some of the benefits, challenges and barriers that the key person system may have on an early years setting, its provision, the children and their families. It will discuss transitions that children may experience, and how practitioners can help to support them and their families during this process. This will have reference to appropriate theorists such as John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. Supporting references will be shown throughout this essay to support the writing.

    Read More

  • College Essay

    607 Words  | 2 Pages

    At the start of the semester, my oblivious state of nature associating with the Chinese culture reached an unacceptable level. Implementing a necessary change, I decided to educate myself on different cultures starting with China. I failed to ponder that such a rich, deep culture existed outside America. Encompassed by this country’s unique yet suffocating melting pot culture, my outlook believed ideas such as uniformity between American Chinese food and Authentic Chinese food. After this course, my bigot perspective widened as I witnessed diversity in the world. Before this class, when I thought of Chinese food, my connotation jumped to thoughts associated with chop suey, but as I progressed my education, my mindset gradually pondered foods like steamed buns or “New Year Cakes” with authentic Chinese food.

    Read More

  • Coleridge and the Relation in-between Poet and Critic

    4808 Words  | 10 Pages

    Is it possible, fruitful, or confusing to view Coleridge's aesthetic ideas as fragments (parts) toward the composition of a kind of larger theoretical poem (whole)? In other words, can one use Coleridge's art criticism to comment upon his practice as a theorist? Are his aesthetic ideas applicable to his practice as a critic of the practice of poetic composition? Is it possible that some leverage could be obtained by torquing Coleridge's theoretical statements about poetry in particular and art in general to comment on his own compositional practice as a critic? Quite simply, is Coleridge's theory true to the ideals of his critical practice? The caveat here is that it is precisely my intention to answer these questions indirectly. The idea is to use these problems as the hub of a wheel of a widening set of questions whose fragmentary sections, like the spokes of the "old coach wheel," radiate outward from a central ambiguity (Genial 472). The method is guided by Adorno's thoughts on the subject of the essay itself, which he suggests "incorporates the anti-systematic impulse into its own way of proceeding and introduces concepts unceremoniously, 'immediately,' just as it receives them. They are made more precise only through their relationship to one another" (12). Though the argument appears to be circular it would be more accurate to say that it circulates, and thus reflects upon a process of reciprocal exchanges. One might say of Coleridge that his intuition unfolds over thinking, rather than under-standing.

    Read More

  • James Weldon Johnson

    1226 Words  | 3 Pages

    and founded a short-lived newspaper called The Daily American. For ten years, he wrote editorials for the New York Age, a prominent African-American newspaper. He was one of the founders and a charter member of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, and he became field secretary for the NAACP in 1916. The song was originally written for schoolchildren at an Abraham Lincoln birthday celebration in 1900. The Creation

    Read More

  • College Admissions Essay: A Life Changing Experience

    760 Words  | 2 Pages

    The experience of the APEC Youth Science festival was incredible. It has had an enormous impact on me in many ways, changing the way I look at the world and connecting me with people and events far beyond my formerly limited experience. I am extremely glad to have had this opportunity. It was a wonderful experience on multiple levels. It challenged me and expanded me intellectually and socially. I feel that this experience has had an immense impact on me.

    Read More

  • College Admissions Essay: My Dad

    388 Words  | 1 Pages

    In writing about an important person in my life, there are a number of people that I could discuss. But, I feel that the person who is very special to me and one who has been the most influential, is my dad.

    Read More

  • College Admissions Essay: Man of the Year

    532 Words  | 2 Pages

    "You have just been named the 2015 Man/Woman of the Year. For what achievement are you being honored, and how did your college education help you reach your goal?"

    Read More

  • The Composition and Publication History of Samuel T. Coleridge's Kubla Khan

    2591 Words  | 6 Pages

    When Kubla Khan was first published in 1816, contemporary reviewers noted the poem’s fragmentary nature and spoke of its nonsensical style, imagery, and content. The poem was, in a sense, viewed as not a “wholly meaningful poem, but only meaningless music.” More recent studies by scholar E. S. Shaffer asserted that Coleridge intended for Kubla Khan to be a part of his project to create “a new kind of epic poem” that was to be called The Fall of Jerusalem. Shaffer believes that Coleridge was unable to complete this epic project, and consequently, left Kubla Khan as “an epic fragment” that has bred a myth of fragmentation that has followed the poem since its initial publi...

    Read More

  • Harvard Admissions Essay: My Inspiration and Sanctuary

    855 Words  | 2 Pages

    We all have a sanctuary, be it a favorite book or song, or a special, private spot by the river. My sanctuary is somewhat unique, given that so few people are fortunate enough to have it. It is 5'2" with warm hazel eyes, a gentle smile, and the most beautiful soul I have encountered in my eighteen years of life. I call her Nona.

    Read More

  • The Poem Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coloridge

    861 Words  | 2 Pages

    Coleridge successfully illustrates the qualities of imagination in his poem, Kubla Khan, through the sound of words, the creative content and his ability to create and recreate. Coleridge turns the words of the poem into a system of symbols that are suspended in the reader’s mind. Coleridge uses creative powers to establish the infinite I AM, a quality of the primary imagination. Coleridge mirrors his primary and secondary imagination in the poem by taking apart and recreating images. The qualities of imagination discussed in the poem exist independently but also work together to create an imaginative world. It is important to understand how the poem works to achieve these qualities, but also how the poem works to bring the reader back to reality. The powers and qualities of imagination are present in Kubla Khan and it is through Coleridge’s extraordinary writing that the reader is able to experience an imaginative world, in which we alternate between reality and imagination.

    Read More

More about College Admissions Essays: An Influential Person or Event

Open Document