The Admission Essay

The Admission Essay A Pole reciting the opening of Pan Tadeusz is like an American reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Its author, Adam Mickiewicz, is considered something of a literary god, somewhere between Dante and Shakespeare. Self-confidence is something I have struggled very long and hard with. It was late December and the snow was gently falling outside. I sat in an armchair in front of a wood fire with a cup of tea and read. I read for hours until my skin stung, my neck stiffened and my head ached. I used to worry that I would stand outâ€"especially in school. The views of my society are rather one dimensional towards being different. When reflecting that becoming part of this society would lead me to self-hatred, I have come to see Master as an example. The hardship he undergoes and the courage he portrays afterwards have inspired me to embrace who I am. He has always encouraged me to have my own personal outlook and opinion. A small book of Greek myths is my moral base, and, because of it, I am now pursuing a more classical education. I was trapped in a classroom where my peers could only see one truth, one dimension of a book because they hadn’t read it. After I had returned the book to the public library, I was still reciting The Raven by memory. Even then, I deeply appreciated that an emotion could be found in a strange combination of words. I understood that books, like people, carry complex emotions. I also understood that this was not a story about a raven. I can already see itâ€"myself, sitting in classrooms where everyone wants to be thereâ€"where I am not being measured, rated, scored, and I can learn through communicating, not testing. Where Johnnies not only question my truths, but theirs too. My first booklove was Edgar Allan Poe’s Great Tales and Poems. ” The Clevenger in me responds to this new question with a sense of patriotic, even divine, duty. D’aulaires’ genuine storytelling provided me with a basis of classic thought as a young child. This classical state of mind has remained with me throughout my public education, pushing me towards extracurricular resources focusing on Greco-Roman culture. I am desperate to understand not only the myths, but the politics and day-to-day lives of citizens. This foundation of classical thought has allowed me to navigate modern literature. At night, I would draw myself a bath and lay in it until the water went cold and read. Most distinctly I remember running to the bathroom, chapter after chapter, to throw up. It was all at once a beautiful and harrowing experience. I will continue to do so for the rest of my life. Much like an individual doesn’t realize how hungry she is until she takes a bite of food, my intellectual hunger rose and demanded that I feast. I began to question the ideas behind my everyday actions regardless of whether other people thought this was a relevant line of inquiry or not. Out of this confusion and curiosity, my AP Research paper on the nature of open-mindedness as an intellectual virtue in epistemology emerged. Readers at the time of the book’s publication would have remembered these, their imaginations leaving Paris for the Polish countryside. The poem’s lyrical Alexandrines transported me back to Poland, especially when the words were softly murmured, huddled underneath blankets, the pages illuminated with a flickering flashlight. I first began reading Pan Tadeusz when I was thirteen. And perhaps because it was my decision to read this epic, my reaction to it was stronger than it otherwise would have been. Until then, being Polish meant little more to me than having a second passport, wearing a traditional dress on holidays, and having a passel of cousins across the ocean. Being Polish was a part of me, but not something I paid much attention to. This epic is not only a great bookâ€"it is the great book of Poland, as important and symbolic as the Vistula River that flows from the Polish mountains to the Baltic sea. Constitution, Poles are required to memorize sections of Pan Tadeusz, especially those which are thought to embody the core of what it means to be Polish.