A Sage Insight About the College Essay
I was at a small get-together last weekend with my girlfriend's family. I was making the rounds, chatting up the aunts and uncles and cousins and grandmother, when I found myself pulled into a conversation with my girlfriend's uncle.
My girlfriend's uncle is an interesting guy. He's a self-taught mycologist. He's pretty big time in the pacific northwest where, if you don't know, mushrooms are a big deal.
We were discussing foraging for truffles. Truffles are a notoriously rare subterranean mushroom that grow in Europe and some other parts of the world. Two types grow in Washington State. One grows in warmer weather, in the spring and summer. When the temperature shifts around November, almost overnight, like a light-switch, the variety of truffles also shifts to the cold-weather-loving variety. Mushrooms are amazing.
When I asked him how many mushrooms he could spot after a career of spotting mushrooms, his answer surprised me. "Oh," he said. "Not too many. But I know a lot about the ones I can recognize."
Of course, his "not too many" is roughly 50x the number I can identify.
But he continued on with this lovely metaphor: For him, he said, mushrooms are like "all the people in the wide world." Hundreds, thousands pass by, but only a few grab your attention. We don't attempt to give equal attention to each passerby, no, we focus in on those few with whom we form an immediate attachment.
We follow them down the rabbit hole. We learn about their lives, their dreams, their flaws. We spend hours, years, decades learning about their lives with an almost obsessive and singular focus. Because human connection, and, in his case, intellectual infatuation, is not a numbers' game. We don't go an inch deep and a mile wide. We work in silos that extend as deep as we are able to make them, in the limited time we have on the earth.
His metaphor hit me partly because of its immediate applicability to the college application process. There is a concept I like that I came across on Twitter. Humans don't have short attention spans, they have short consideration spans. We will spend hours binging a show, a whole year reading a complex and glacial novel, decades with our friends or partners... if only we get "hooked" up front. We have a near-infinite tolerance and attention span for the things we care about.
Instilling that level of care in an AO is the true magic that you're trying to work through your college essays. If you think your goal in the college essay is to IMPRESS someone, you're wrong.
You are trying to make them, for lack of better words, fall in love with you. Your goal is to become one of the 50 mushrooms that my girlfriend's uncle has spent his LIFE studying.
This is somewhat of a food-for-thought post, and I feel guilty setting up such a broad "goal" without giving any advice about how to get there. The only thing I can say is that I've been reading John Dewis' "Hack the College Essay" and so far, I'm very impressed. I would recommend taking a look at that. The man has a thing or two to say.
But I'll leave it with this. You have a story to tell, but, right now, you probably don't know what it is - because you are anxious and uncertain about the "best" way to woo AOs. In Dewis' words (to which I add my own assent) the story you need to tell is the "one that only you can tell." This advice may seem thin, cliche, or empty at first blush. But it is worth ruminating on and taking seriously. What's the story that only you can tell?
-Alex