This is an essay I’ve been working on for the Common Application prompt “Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.”
Below is what feels like my 15th draft…I can’t believe how horrible it was when I first started writing it. Anyway, please give me some feedback.
Night after night my chess team members and I reluctantly staffed our high school concessions stand, listening to thundering cheers resonating from basketball fans and wishing we too were in the stands watching the game. The whole time I was working, however, I had one thought in the back of my mind: the day we would arrive in Nashville, Tennessee, eager to push our brains to the limit for three days of ruthless checkerboard competition.
Super Nationals III, the nations most prodigious scholastic chess tournament, beckoned my schools club. Our only limitation was money, but a delicate opportunity akin to a chess games fresh, black and white starting position unveiled itself. Fundraising at my schools concessions stand to afford the potential expedition tested and emphasized three elements of my life: leadership, responsibility and gratification.
Arrogance, an alluring queen that would have been painless to capture, was the first feeling that challenged me. I was tempted to treat my team mates like pawns and make them do all the work of filling paper bags with buttery popcorn and returning change to customers. But then I remembered I would be partaking in the funds we received for our efforts as much as anyone else. The glowing hotdog cooker, seemingly reading my mind, ensnared me and put me to work. Eventually my teammates and I became relieved and confident after we realized that we were capable of taming the long lines of hungry and thirsty enemy knights and bishops which swarmed us during half time.
Indolence, too, was an emotion I had to master. When I felt like taking a selfish break on a Friday night (and failing to inform my team mates of the concessions stands need of our help), my goal of contending in a tournament of thousands of chess players flashed through my consciousness. This kept me focused on my objective, as the need to work for a sufficient number of nights to afford our trip certainly outweighed the appeal to relax at home.
Months of faithful labor gave birth to thundering aircraft reverberations and the sweet smell of airport coffee: My unified chess team was finally on its way to Nashville! It only became authentic when I was pressed into my seat as our airplane lifted off from starlit pavement. I smiled, trying to imagine how exhilarating it was going to be to spend three days, hundreds of miles from home, among so many people who shared my passion. I felt as though I had deservedly reached an optimal chess position after weeks of maneuvering my army of pieces. With a deep breath and a peek at my friends around me in the same aura of contentment, I knew there was more to chess than two brains, plastic pieces and vinyl boards.
National chess tournaments in which I had participated in the past were practically free. Raising funds to go to Nashville, though, was like hunting down and satisfyingly checkmating a fugitive king crowned with dollar signs.
P.S.: I’m applying to a few Ivy League schools along with MIT, Caltech, & Stanford. I’m not asking for my chances of admission, but is the above essay enough to compensate for 2150 SATs and 3.838/4.0 [unweighted] GPA?
Thanks! 