How To Write The Perfect College Admission Essay

How To Write The Perfect College Admission Essay I share a cultural reference frame with Catch-22 that enriches the experience. In contrast, if my copy of Don Quixote didn’t have footnotes, I would be quite lost. The D’aulaire’s take on Greek tales gives sweetness and life to staggeringly human stories while still painting characters in divine light. Although gods, the heroes of Olympus would make mistakes, get angry, and fall in love. This basic principle that even gods made mistakes allowed me to process my everyday life. I am unable to say that any one book is important to me, all I can say is that Catch-22 is important to me today and hope to discover the book that will be important to me tomorrow. I invite St. John’s to help me find that book, and perhaps I will be able to help someone else find their’s. War Satire as a sub-genre is of particular importance. The seriousness of war, literally life and death, makes it a subject people tend to develop core values around. We allow people to see past what the media and authority figures have trained them to believe and instead think for themselves in their own self-interest. These seditious thoughts that break the myth of glory, and prevent unnecessary sacrifice are of great value if we are to have a society comprised of critical thinkers. 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. The prompt for this essay was “Discuss a book that has particular significance for you. What effect does it have on what you think or how you think? ” Every bit of art, knowledge, thought, and opinion has value and can change a person. If you really care about ideas, explaining why one is important is almost impossible because every idea intersects with and plays off of other ideas. Although divorce is not an issue of the gods, they fell in and out of love and this was synonymous with events in my own life, and with members of my own family. While arguments with my brother could never be described as divine, our struggles often reminded me of the fights between Apollo and Artemis, siblings who squabbled but ultimately loved each other. The story of Orpheus, the musician who looked back at the last second to ensure his beloved was following him, remains a non-example in matters of perseverance. Such a society is necessary if the poor are to overcome the effects of media and politicians made up of and owned by the wealthy. Catch-22 speaks to me because I don’t have the combat experience many people associate with military service. It spends most of its pages describing the time between combat, the little absurdities that make up the majority of time in the military, with very short bursts of action. Being overtly anti-war could cause you and your message to be immediately dismissed by those that view an anti-war stance as anti-troop or anti-patriotic. The poor pay the price while the rich reap the benefit. By using satire to infiltrate the minds that would not be receptive to direct anti-war messages, we allow the anti-war messages to form in the readers’ own heads. I was one of those very people and I would be lying if I said that I fully appreciate math for what it is. Only through my own curiosity and self-motivated research have I learned to appreciate more than I had before. Surreal Numbers by Knuth helped me put what numbers are into more perspective. It is a rather slim book, yet because of its density it takes awhile to read in order to understand what it says. For every book I read I find myself adding at least three more to my reading list, whether they inspired the author or were inspired by him. The most beautiful things in the world are ideas, constantly changing, altered by experience and learning. In Plato’s Meno (thanks for sending!), Socrates posed an ingenious question to his student about how to double the area of a square. The student intuited that one would simply double the side lengths of the square but in reality that would quadruple the area of the square. The story does not shy away from the dark and confusing. The characters struggle with death and injustice and poverty.