Application Essay Requirements

Application Essay Requirements My mother read me Miss Rumphius regularly before bed and from the redheaded heroine’s delicate tale, I crafted not only my goals in life, but my approach to adulthood as well. Like other fantasy writers who go by initials, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. I find it very intriguing that with the right story and progression, anyone can be led to not only a deeper understanding of a subject but also a greater appreciation for one. We use these building blocks of math and numbers all of the time and yet we do not truly stop to think about what they are or why they work the way they do. 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. Despite this, there is a calm joy in her independence, and her adventures to faraway places seem to fill her life with meaning. I have longed for this freedom all my life, and it has been my ultimate goal in pursuing colleges, careers, mentors, and even social circles. The narrator is a niece, so Miss Rumphius had to have had a sibling, but the young Alice speaks only of her aunt, and so was born my dreams of being an inspirational aunt myself. Miss Rumphius was patient and listened to herself, and so could find her place by the sea. Lewis, Rowling summons foreign phrases, literary devices, and language jokes, and transfigures them into clever names for her characters, objects, and places. The works of Tolkien and Lewis reflect their authors’ knowledge of philology, but can veer into pretentiousness. There have been so many times in high school where we’ve been assigned some math problem for homework and I would just be completely confused by it. For me, that answer doesn’t help, but only leaves me more confused and mystified by math. I want all the above because ignorance is a killer, and willful ignorance is the biggest killer we face as a nation. Unhealthy diets and alcohol-fueled accidents are leading causes of death. We let talking heads and sound bites guide our politics, our philosophy, and our way of life. Rowling seems to want as many readers as possible to share in the fun -- slogging through ancient Gobbledegook epics is not required. As a result of reading this book and the Meno, I have a much different perspective on how knowledge comes into being and how it is communicated, or in the case of my public education, not communicated. The main character is the narrator’s great aunt, not her mother or grandmother. There is no mention of her being involved romantically, marrying, or even considering a family - she is unapologetically independent. 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? Whether it is a Republican or a Democrat, a talking head is a talking head, and a blind decision is a blind decision, no matter what choice you make. I can’t help but think that if more people read Descartes, Plato, and maybe even the U.S. Constitution, we’d have a higher level of political discourse and a better government. This may not have hit me with the same depth at age five as it does now, but looking back at Miss Rumphius, I can see the sowing of my current thought processes. 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. Socrates then leads the student though a series of understandable steps proving that in order to double the area of a square, one must construct a square with the side length of the diagonal of the original square. 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. In Plato’s Meno (thanks for sending!), Socrates posed an ingenious question to his student about how to double the area of a square.