<p>Virtuoso - I know you worked for weeks on that essay. For starters, you should not post your essay on the cc website. No one should. Of course we all want to be helpful but you never know if someone could take your ideas and use it as their own. You are better off to privately send your essay to posters on cc who you have come to know through their posts and whom you believe you might trust.
Since you have already posted and you have obviously put a lot of hard work into your essay and a great deal of time, I will offer my thoughts. I thought that that essay started off in an interesting way, but went in a direction that does not convey who you are. Your application along with all the components needs to conjure up an image of you as a live, breathing person walking around the campus and contributing to it. Not only do all the parts of the application including your essay need to fit together and reinforce each other, but the essay should be a reflection of you. Admission officers after reading that essay will not know anything else about you other then the fact that you like fish and acquariums. If you had for example tied that intereste in fish to doing research at an acquarium and how that experience impacted your life, that might have been different. It is not so much the subject that you choose to talk about in the essay, but what is more important is to give the admisison officers a picture of who you are.
What you really need to do is to think about and write down all the qualities and characteristics that describe you, your passions, your intererests, what is important to you, where you see yourself in the future, your strengths and weaknesses, ect and look it over and get a sense of who you are and what you want to convey. Then, you could find the vehicle to convey it. Perhaps there is a way to use the story that you have posted, but only if you can find a way to give it a greater meaning in your life.</p>