There's more to the story of You Sometimes, you can get so focused on "telling your story" in your college essay that you forget to include a strong portrait of the current you, your present self, with your present aspirations. So don't be surprised when we pitch "meditation"; it's the amp to your music, optimizing everything you do and bringing out your best, now. Which is exactly what you want to show schools. Take a big breath. Who's breathing? Sounds like a ridiculous question, yup. But-- it's You. Yes, YOU! This you is the person colleges are saying YES to. The one they want to meet and to know. When colleges accept you, they are banking on your future, not your past. Right now is the path to the future What you are doing with your time, energy, and enthusiasm right now is a better predictor of what you will be doing in one, two, or ten years (when your alma mater can brag that you are its graduate) than any story you might tell. Why? Because it's what all that story stuff has led to, the young adult person choosing a direction (or many) in the world. So your core stories are still key, are still your power vehicle for showing your strongest personal qualities and what has shaped you...but don't drop the potato there. In your essay, point toward the future, and be real What are you up to right now? What matters to you, what are you committed to, what are your short and long terms aspiration? (We all know those can change: that's fine.) These questions help you define your present and point towards your future. Plus, it's great for self-knowledge Asking these question leads to greater self-knowledge-- something colleges look for in applicants. But it's not a service you can pay someone else for, Kaplan doesn't have bubble sheets to help you get there; it's DIY, develop-it-yourself, through introspection, and it's a premium quality of good leaders. Not sure how to get started on self-knowledge quest? We recommend basic meditation, Continue Reading …
Destiny
Is your heart in your college essay?
College application season means advice and anxiety come at you from all corners. It's easy to lose heart. Are you able to spend time wondering (not worrying, but wondering) about the future, or are your days too crammed with test prep, school projects, responsibilities at home? Are you trying to crunch a bunch of facts and make them add up to your "dream school" or "reach school" or "safety school"? (Or you trying to visualize the next chapter of your life based on what attracts you, what challenges you, what pushes you, what makes you feel at ease?) Are you trying to declare that you already know what you want to study, so that you can go ahead and be convincing and study it? Hold on. You know that deflated feeling when your crush likes someone else? You know that deflated feeling when you are hungry and stuck on a subway? You know that deflated feeling when your parents want you to talk to a distant elderly relative about how school is going? That's the feeling that happens to us when we don't listen to our hearts. Luckily we can always reboot. Continue Reading …
Coming & Going, A Lizard Death
Today, to mix it up, I wrote my own personal essay-- no more than 650 words (the magic number). You can decide if this passes muster as a personal statement. While you read, play the all-powerful admissions officer, not the humble applicant. What, if anything, do you learn about the essay's writer? What, if you had to guess, might the writer be like to hang out with? And so on... * This morning, my husband John went to feed our two adult bearded dragons, and the big, beefy lizard, Drako, the one I called "fat old man"-- though he was really only a middle-aged lizard, if that-- the one who lazed around with his belly spreading out over his driftwood-- was dead. (Please hang in there, ye non-empathetic to the reptilian plight). LIke we say of dead people (some of them), he "looked asleep", but a little too stiff. There is something in our veins that recognizes our fate in that "little too stiff", no matter the creature. I admit I recoiled from his frozen body even as my heart leapt forward like a hopeful medic. The weight of any death, however reptilean, conjures every death I have been through-- every death, even that of our little plants that inexplicably and stubbornly failed to thrive, giving me the existential middle finger. Because John had to run to work, and because we did not know the cause of death, and because there was a second bearded dragon in the tank to worry about, John picked up Drako and put him hastily in our oversized planter, where our corn plant faltered and grew asymmetrically. In that dirt was the long-since-decomposed body of another baby beardie, the runt of our clutch. We'd introduced the fertile and lithe Sunny to Drako's tank last fall. After some awkward co-habitation, Drako had found (from his deep biological recesses) his ne'er-before-aired male swag and done the species-typical head-bobbing dominance dance atop her. He looked smug, not knowing Sunny was already pregnant from another male. Lizards don't make a Continue Reading …
Getting Everything You Want
Rick Benjamin, my mentor, beloved friend, and current poet laureate of Rhode Island, gets everything he wants. But that's because what he wants is to circulate the wisdom that words, and maybe words alone, can carry. His preferred medium is poetry, which calls words back to their sharpened purpose. In the everyday, words are such common currency that we can easily waste them or use them cheaply (ever done that?)-- the way we can waste our breath, or even waste our lives, given to us so freely. Wise words beckon us, AGAIN, to pay attention to what we are really saying, being, doing. I am on this topic now because there is so much WANTING bound up with the college application process: the schools we want to attend or want our children to attend, the status or recognition we want (very much) to gain or not to lose-- and the want to be Wanted. The process can be overwhelming and leave little room for breathing, for common sense, or for just plain joy in what is. On New Years Day, a day that can be auspicious or a Big Headache or both, Rick and I chewed over ideas for his monthly column for the Providence Journal (which you can and should read regularly here)-- something about change, what else? The poem "Oceans" I have long cherished popped up as fitting-- do we get what we expect? Do we even know what we already have? Are we closed or opened to change? o c e a n s I have a feeling that my boat has struck, down there in the depths, against a great thing. And nothing happens! Nothing … Silence … Waves … —Nothing happens? Or has everything happened, and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life? ~Juan Ramon Jimenez, trans. by Robert Bly This simple poem teaches me at every rereading. If you want to get everything you want, it's easy enough: adjust your wants. Jimenez, perhaps not even meaning to, teaches us to feel and listen and be brave enough to notice that we may already be standing in the new life, the next "great Continue Reading …
A Writer’s Inheritance: Fake it, then make it
Free-write Faker I follow my own rules for creativity when I’m with my students. When we free write, the law of the land is don’t stop writing no matter what. Because I am used to this physical commitment, rarely does nothing come out. So when my mind careened into a non-verbal ditch at an inopportune moment, in order to stay with the game, I kept on by fake writing. Not faking writing, but writing fake words. Pen still in motion. Rule not broken. Continue Reading …
Grammar As Game-Changer
Risky Statements Supposedly, Martin Luther King Jr. began his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” on bits of toilet paper—the only paper he could get in confinement. His need to express his position on peaceful protest, like the need to use the bathroom, was that urgent. This was a personal statement, impeccable in its grammar, that risked his personhood in order to stand up for non-violent resistance as a radical act of love. This mission was why he was alive, and also why he would not be alive for very long. Continue Reading …