Hello everyone! I have applied to Cornell however I feel as though my essay was too pretentious and I am scared that they will immediately throw it out. I wasn’t writing in such a manner for the college rather this is my writing style plain and simple. Any ideas? Thanks!
Defining my Personhood Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Brain
Two summers ago I set out on a quest without leaving my house with people who I did not (nor will ever) meet. I had just turned fifteen and with the age came a surly streak of rebellion that transmogrified my bangs into blinders and my bottom lip into a rimy overhang. I had renewed my subscription to the lesbian sisterhood with my first girlfriend, but my childish wish for insurrection did not protect me from feeling outcasted in a small southern town with small southern values. To accept my identity, I discerned (with a tenacity that only a potent mixture of hormones could concoct) that I had to define my personhood outside the God-fearing parameters that enveloped me. So, I closed my eyes, spun around, and picked a direction to travel.
Up the road a’ways I discovered literature, feeling validated in my angst by the likes of Holden Caulfield and Alex Delarge. But validation, though gratifying, could not dispassionately define personhood.
I craved the concrete.
And thus I turned to philosophy. I waltzed with Kant’s autonomy and wept with Nietzsche’s selbstüberwindung.
But again, I longed for an impartial review of my humanity.
Here are where things get (and I shall put this in the most pretentious way I can): sciencey. To create a palpable model of personhood, I realized that I needed to look within not metaphorically, but literally. I traveled up the nasociliary nerve and past the olfactory bulb, pausing to wipe my brow at Caudal orbital cortex. I looked up at the unassuming three-pound mass of tissue (the end of the line) and fathomed that it had forged every book I had read and every philosophy I had adopted. The paths of my journey had converged at this spot: The human mind.
The reason I have spun this anecdote is because I believe that this journey mirrors Cornell’s educational philosophy- to facilitate the convergence of all disciplines so as to foremost ensure that every student is fluent in all aspects of a chosen area. At Cornell, neuroscience “thinks outside the box.” Rather than being relegated to the straitjacket of specialized medicine, It is stitched neatly into a myriad of other sciences. Cornell’s students of neuroscience can magnify this pluralism by traveling to Copenhagen and Amsterdam, freeing thought from the box of western culture into a rumpus of global proportions. But the tendrils of Cornell’s academia expand not only outward but inward to the metaphysical. With Dr. Schiff’s pioneering research into the enigma of consciousness, they twist into the heart of my summertime quest: “what makes me human?” In Cornell’s motto “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study” lies the truth I uncovered the summer of my fifteenth year. That the discovery of one’s passion is filled with scenic loops and quaint roadside attractions that one must explore to add richness to the final academic destination. That a skinny lesbian with tentative aspirations can walk down the road of personal acceptance only to end up at a neuroscience turnoff covered with overgrowth. So, to whoever I am sending this to. I have not met you (nor may I ever), so you must pardon the manners of one who is essentially a ghost. I must away without a proper goodbye for the road extends ever forward and the trip is certain to be long (and that doesn’t include the occasional stop for gas).