admission essays

These discussions of good/bad/scary college admission essay questions have me realizing that I have no memory at all of what my admission essay questions were. Many were probably the stupid "tell us about a significant experience in your life and how it changed you" business, and I have no idea what I'd have said at the time. The "give us page 217 of your 300-page autobiography" is in practice almost the same question, but phrased in a less restrictive manner, and that's enough to make it a relative hit with the people having this discussion.

It's interesting that most of the commenters like the cute and weird questions designed to push the limits of the students' creative ability, but a few people despise them. I'd bet that there are more intelligent and academically qualified people out there who despise these but aren't inclined to spend their time writing blog comments. I agree with the guy who said that it would be hard to avoid writing porn for that U of Chicago "I had no idea they could do that with ordinary string" question (though my 18-year-old self would have been traumatized by the very thought), and am also amused by the person who had had no significant life events. I think I actually had a similar problem; by that point I had gone through life events that were significant to me, but no major drama that fell into the traditional young-adult-novel/Afterschool Special categories, having been a Good Kid.

The one I vividly remember doing was actually the essay on the Advanced Placement French language exam-- I don't exactly remember what the question was, but it was one of those life-experience things; and I figured, what the hell, some anonymous test grader is going to read this, and poured out pages of anguish about a brain-damaging high-school crush in my mangled and circumlocutory classroom French. They probably got about a million of those.

Charles Schulz

Zompist's "Bob's Comics Reviews" describes the appeal and essence of Peanuts perfectly. Another of my Christmas acquisitions was the nicely done coffee-table book Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz, which contains ample reminders of how subtly brilliant he was in his best years (about 1955-1975, as the review says, though the strip was occasionally great well into the 1980s).

What happened after that? Why were the late Peanuts strips so uninteresting by comparison? The review suggests that Schulz, who seems to have been a deeply nice man, became increasingly unwilling to add the bit of cruelty that characterizes his best work. Others have said that the increasing focus on Snoopy's fantasy life and burgeoning extended family was the problem. I think that as he got older, Schulz was just getting further from the ability to empathize with the child's-eye view of the strip (which was also why it became more and more about the decreasingly doglike Snoopy and less about the crucial trio of Charlie Brown, Lucy and Linus). Keep in mind also that it's insanely difficult to keep any sustained creation fresh over almost fifty years; it's almost cruel to expect it. In any event, Schulz's golden period had a gigantic effect on the culture and on comics, and most people drawing comic strips today owe some debt to him.