10 College Application Essay Dos And Donts

10 College Application Essay Dos And Don'ts There is no mention of her being involved romantically, marrying, or even considering a family - she is unapologetically independent. Despite this, there is a calm joy in her independence, and her adventures to faraway places seem to fill her life with meaning. I have longed for this freedom all my life, and it has been my ultimate goal in pursuing colleges, careers, mentors, and even social circles. The narrator is a niece, so Miss Rumphius had to have had a sibling, but the young Alice speaks only of her aunt, and so was born my dreams of being an inspirational aunt myself. Miss Rumphius was patient and listened to herself, and so could find her place by the sea. The student intuited that one would simply double the side lengths of the square but in reality that would quadruple the area of the square. The prompt for this essay was “Discuss a book that has particular significance for you. What effect does it have on what you think or how you think? This perspective is increasingly, and tragically, rare in a world obsessed with information and afraid of questions. Intellectual complacency even pervades higher education where students are more concerned with marketing themselves and acquiring credentials than pursuing truth and acquiring wisdom. Beliefs are too often determined by trends and political bias, because in the social media age, how we are perceived matters more to us than what we actually think. I want to go to St. John’s because the whole methodology is in such a way that I can begin to love math. I can’t help but think that if more people read Descartes, Plato, and maybe even the U.S. Constitution, we’d have a higher level of political discourse and a better government. This may not have hit me with the same depth at age five as it does now, but looking back at Miss Rumphius, I can see the sowing of my current thought processes. The main character is the narrator’s great aunt, not her mother or grandmother. Lewis, Rowling summons foreign phrases, literary devices, and language jokes, and transfigures them into clever names for her characters, objects, and places. The works of Tolkien and Lewis reflect their authors’ knowledge of philology, but can veer into pretentiousness. Rowling seems to want as many readers as possible to share in the fun -- slogging through ancient Gobbledegook epics is not required. As a result of reading this book and the Meno, I have a much different perspective on how knowledge comes into being and how it is communicated, or in the case of my public education, not communicated. I want all the above because ignorance is a killer, and willful ignorance is the biggest killer we face as a nation. Unhealthy diets and alcohol-fueled accidents are leading causes of death. We let talking heads and sound bites guide our politics, our philosophy, and our way of life. Whether it is a Republican or a Democrat, a talking head is a talking head, and a blind decision is a blind decision, no matter what choice you make. Only through my own curiosity and self-motivated research have I learned to appreciate more than I had before. Surreal Numbers by Knuth helped me put what numbers are into more perspective. It is a rather slim book, yet because of its density it takes awhile to read in order to understand what it says. In Plato’s Meno (thanks for sending!), Socrates posed an ingenious question to his student about how to double the area of a square. I find it very intriguing that with the right story and progression, anyone can be led to not only a deeper understanding of a subject but also a greater appreciation for one. We use these building blocks of math and numbers all of the time and yet we do not truly stop to think about what they are or why they work the way they do. I was one of those very people and I would be lying if I said that I fully appreciate math for what it is. Every tutorial and seminar is taught with this same level of depth and understanding. At St. John’s math has life, beauty, purpose and in college I don’t want to wonder why the quadratic formula is written the way it is, I want to know. There have been so many times in high school where we’ve been assigned some math problem for homework and I would just be completely confused by it. For me, that answer doesn’t help, but only leaves me more confused and mystified by math. My mother read me Miss Rumphius regularly before bed and from the redheaded heroine’s delicate tale, I crafted not only my goals in life, but my approach to adulthood as well. Like other fantasy writers who go by initials, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S.