Five Tips To Craft Your College Admission Essay

Five Tips To Craft Your College Admission Essay It was as if the world finally came to terms with your mind. Like waking up from a dream to realize a truer, better world, the Narnians were led to the truest and most awoken state. It is a simple parable that reminds of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, where one man emerges from a lifetime of staring at shadows dancing on a cave wall to a real and vibrant and three-dimensional world. I had read Plato’s Republic, his Allegory of the Cave, and various dialogues in my sophomore year; I was surprisingly only finishing the Narnia series in my junior year. The end of the book, and thus the Narnia series, is death. The characters struggle with death and injustice and poverty. I find value in the book’s happy endings, made more meaningful because their happiness is not derived from objective circumstances, but by the power of each character’s belief system. At the end of the book, the reader finds St. John is about to die, Mr. Rochester is badly disabled, Helen Burns is long dead, and Jane isn’t doing anything particularly worthy of ambition. But all of the sympathetic characters are fulfilled and have appeared to live their lives with intention, so their ends are far from tragic. I am tempted to write about a more important book, something a little weightier and more historic, but I feel it would be most appropriate to write about Jane Eyre. I think understanding is more important than ever, because people of almost any culture can be found in almost every country. Some of our neighbors have F1 visas and sit next to us in school. Some of our neighbors become citizens of our country and permanently change and enrich our national identity. Western military personnel and aid workers are side-by-side with tribal fighters and indigenous community leaders, combating terrorism, lawlessness, and poverty. The Last Battle was the spark that gave me hope, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave gave me strength, and Plato’s Republic is what gave me the intellectual confidence in the presence of the ideal and the universal. His ability to so perfectly enunciate why we must never lose hope, and always struggle towards the ideal. I, all artists, and those seeking some sort of universal truth, must try to achieve that purest, most visceral understanding. That idea, presented in Plato’s work, had not yet become clear to me, until I finished reading The Last Battle. He said only understanding yourself and your enemy guarantees victory. He said winning without fighting is the greatest victory. I think we can’t resolve conflicts, avoid wars, or maintain stability without understanding ourselves and our neighbors. In this way they were Socrates-- and I was the student who ended up understanding more than I anticipated, or was expected to, because of the way I was carefully led by the author and his characters. There are no other works that best exemplify that power of words and ideas have had on my life and my outlook on it. C.S. Lewis himself was a big fan of Plato; his works were the key that allowed me to decipher the meaning encoded in the Plato that I had read. Just death, of everyone and everything, as Aslan, the Jesus-like lion and creator of Narnia, leads the dead spirits of all Narnians, including most of the main characters, to…Narnia. Where, as the characters describe, the world was exactly the same as Narnia…but Truer. It was a simple interpretation of heaven, but it struck me. Reading Jane Eyre gave me a vocabulary with which to contemplate my own principles. I find it useful to see my own traits and philosophies in a character, where I can examine them with greater clarity than if I were peering directly into my own mind. I finished re-reading the book in late December and the experience was well timed. This gives me hope that every individual holds ultimate power over her or his own life. They can decide if it is most meaningful to live with dignity, or with kindness, or with passion. Whatever the ultimate outcome, if they have made choices based on their principles, their ending is happy. The story does not shy away from the dark and confusing. My teachers, although they tried, were unable to explain things to me and I, to be fair, was not great at listening to their explanations. The only time I loved math was sophomore year when we did proofs. They were puzzles and fascinating in a way that other math wasn’t. We are becoming a rich gumbo, not a homogenous puree. Rowling’s Harry Potter series was published, I was in third grade. My family bought three copies so my mom, my dad and I could all read it immediately. Rowling’s stories about a boy growing up, having misadventures and facing his destiny enraptured me, but the real witchcraft was in her words. Eventually the couple is able to guide themselves into ever more elaborate notations as they attempt to build proofs to solidify these connected ideas about numbers. The book goes surprisingly far into defining numbers, including advanced concepts such as infinitesimals and the different levels of infinity. This helped me to better understand what numbers are and that I had not appreciated all of the work that had gone into defining them for our use today.