<p>Hey everyone and before you read this I just wanted to thank you for your time.</p>
<p>I am thinking about starting my Common App essay and I wondered if I could throw an idea out to you guys. Tell me honestly if it is good or bad.</p>
<p>Recently I traveled for 2 weeks to Ireland by myself to visit friends and family as my whole family is from there. One night I went to a girls 18th birthday party and there were about 100 Irish kids there that I met. My fondest memory of that night was saying "Hi, I'm Kyle. I'm from America.. it's nice to meet you!" Everyone was so surprised and enthusiastic of my presence because they think Americans are sooooo COOL over there. I wanted to write about my experience this night. It was the BEST night of my life, meeting so many people and experiencing their culture to the fullest extent. Of course I was only a little novelty to them for a night, but to me it was a huge change in mindset. It made me realize that there would be a huge void in my life if I didn't get to do something like this again, meet and make new friends from different areas of the world. Regardless of my future career or college aspirations, I want to make it filled with the presence of other people from everywhere. I want this essay to show that I have a genuine interest in people and interaction and that I can't wait to meet new friends etc.</p>
<p>Could I incorporate this appropriately into a solid essay for admission?</p>
<p>Or is there any other twists I could put in this essay? It's going to be focused on my experience this one night and how it was meaningful in regards to my future.</p>
<p>THANK YOU AGAIN</p>
<p>Brilliant idea, it would make for a very interesting read.</p>
<p>Benjamin Franklin once remarked that travel was the perfect antidote to aging. </p>
<p>Children convey their impressions of the world around them with a refreshing honesty and<br>
unique perspective. As time wears on we acquire filters that preemptively pigeon hole our experiences and color them with prejudices.</p>
<p>What you experienced (as well as the people who met you though to a lesser degree) turned back the clock, life was brand new again, if only for an ephemeral moment. This is what being alive is all about, recapturing the wonder of first impressions as your senses are heightened by unfamiliar surroundings.</p>
<p>Your assignment is to put these feelings (and do it while they are still fresh) into writing in such a manner that your readers get to spend a few moments in your paradise and take a brief respite from an otherwise mundane day. </p>
<p>For my part I’d be fascinated if you wrote this from your viewpoint while contemporaneously mixing in observations from one person who found you so intriguing. Then perhaps put in into a broader context of why people should invest more time into broadening their horizons (sorry, I had to use a cliche).</p>
<p>Thank you so much, that was very helpful. </p>
<p>I will try my best to incorporate what you said. I’m a little confused though about how I could give the reader someone else’s perspective? I want to tie it all together into saying my plan regardless of what my future holds is to meet new people and discover new cultures like I did during that night. And I will make it clear how that one night made me realize the importance in immersing oneself in unfamiliar surroundings because the pay off is great…</p>
<p>May I pm it to you when I finish it?</p>
<p>Certainly, I’d love to read it.</p>
<p>By someone else do you mean not from your perspective, e.g., a third party? You would have to speak to one of the people that met you and try to glean from them what made you so novel in their eyes. The challenge after that is to convey these insights into words that create a powerfully immersive experience for the reader.</p>
<p>I posted part of an essay earlier today on that very subject. Have you always wondered what it is like to suddenly discover you have cancer? This is a piece of an essay written by Christopher Hitchens: </p>
<p>“I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death. But nothing prepared me for the early morning last June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse. The whole cave of my chest and thorax seemed to have been hollowed out and then refilled with slow-drying cement. I could faintly hear myself breathe but could not manage to inflate my lungs. My heart was beating either much too much or much too little. Any movement, however slight, required forethought and planning. It took strenuous effort for me to cross the room of my New York hotel and summon the emergency services.”</p>
<p>Honest, powerful, every word full of purpose, unadorned by intellectual pretense, not a single cliche. The metaphor about slow drying cement immediately resonated with me and still paints a vivid picture to this day.</p>
<p>That sounds like a great topic but don’t forget that it is easy to make a topic like that sound cliche when you say that on that night you “realized the importance of immersing yourself in unfamiliar surroundings because the pay off is great.”</p>
<p>Make the essay lively. Try to make the reader feel as if they were with you on that very day.</p>
<p>If you’d like feedback, you can PM me it:)</p>