A college application essay I wrote two years ago:

PROMPT: WRITE THE BEST ESSAY IN THE WORLD…

Write the best essay in the world. Make sure you’re influenced by everyone, but make sure no one else is influenced by the same person as you. Be original. Write to what the readers want to hear. Write to get into college. That’s all that matters. Make sure your essay is the best ever. It has to be witty and out of the box and original and everything. Everyone else is trying to do the same thing, obviously, so in order to make yours stand out, make sure it is written in crayon. And incredibly mundane. They’ll like that. But make sure you make it witty. And out of the box. That’s all that matters really.

I wrote a million essays. A million. Actually less than that, and far less. And none of them I liked. None of them were very good, none of them got the point across hard enough. Blame it on block scheduling and the fact that I took AP English Literature last year instead of AP English Language. I hear that entire class is writing essays about real life. That would have made things much easier. Give me another essay, or a story, or anything literary for that matter, and I’ll write you an essay for the ages. I got a five on that AP test after all.

But it’s essays like these that give trouble. They frustrate me, because I don’t like to write about real life seriously. Writing just one frustrated me so much, that I wrote this really sarcastic and angry mock-essay (it should have been a non-rhyming poem) to my mom because she suggested ideas for essays that I though were terrible. In actuality, they probably weren’t as bad as I made them out to be. In fact, I guess they could have been pretty good. It’s just one of those things that you end up with when your mom was an English major. She wants everything to be formal and I don’t.

But anyway, the mock essay (we’ll say messy) that I wrote was entitled “PROMPT: WRITE THE BEST ESSAY IN THE WORLD”, which you may notice is the very same as the title to this essay. This is not a coincidence, because this essay was inspired by that one. This one isn’t written entirely in the second person, however, and isn’t nearly as sarcastic. Truthfully, I rather liked that essay, but it was pretty biting. Not the sort of thing I’d want you (the reader) to be reading as one of the only impressions you’d get of me.

The impression I’m supposed to be giving is, of course, that I am a very well rounded young man. I’m supposed to tell you all about all the places I’ve been all over the world (like France and Italy and England and Alaska and all over the Caribbean), and all the good deeds I’ve done (like distributing food to elderly Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia), and all the work experiences I’ve had (like when I was a summer camp counselor in Pennsylvania this last summer for ten and eleven year old boys, for eight weeks at a sleep away camp). I’m also supposed to come across as an active member of my community and school and tell about all the great things I’ve done (like founding clubs and presiding over swim teams and participating in honor societies and the like). I guess you’d also like to learn about all the rigorous honors and AP classes I took.

Of course you’d also like to know who has influenced me. You probably don’t want to know how much my mother and father have impacted me (unless of course I do it particularly well and originally), because you’ve heard that about a thousand times all ready. You might guess how much Holden Caulfield’s philosophies have influenced me (you should have read an essay I wrote on that book), and you’ll probably realize I’ve read a lot of Jack Kerouac. When I talk about the Lomographic movement in photography, you might not know what that is, but you’ll be happy to know that that influenced me as well. I’ve been influenced by a lot of things, actually, even though I say that nothing influenced me.

I’ll have to talk about swimming and what an affect that has had on my life. And it has really. Through swimming, I became quite a time- and goal-oriented young man. Much more so than any of my friends. I’m disciplined, and I can hold my breath for a really long time to boot. Seeing other people swim, too, has affected me; watching them slack off during practice pushes me to a higher level of self-motivation. I never want to be seen pretending I have a cramp during ten one-hundreds on the one-ten. Never. And I like to think that mentality has carried over to my school work as well.

Just remind me that when I start talking about how much each and every one of my teachers has impacted me (and they have), that I need to really start thinking about what I’m writing. Once you get to know me, you’ll realize that that is not my style at all.

The best thing about writing these essays, really, is that it has prepared me for the time when I eventually have kids and they eventually have to do the college application thing. I’ll only have a single word of advice for them. I’ll look them right in the eye and tell them to make sure they write the best essay in the world. And then I’ll tell them I did.