I am applying to Madison, and any corrections or criticisms for this draft would be appreciated!
Prompt:
The University values an educational environment that provides all members of the campus community with opportunities to grow and develop intellectually, personally, culturally and socially. In order to give us a more complete picture of you as an individual, please tell us about the particular life experiences, perspectives, talents, commitments and/or interests you will bring to our campus. In other words, how will your presence enrich our community? Respond in 250 to 500 words.
Response:
When I was ten years old, my grandfather gave me a small paperback book called The Beginner's Guide to the Universe. It looked tattered and was slightly bent, with yellow pages that smelled dusty and dry. The cover was a smoky galaxy, spattered with light and activity. It didn't interest me very much at first, but when I finally got around to reading it, I felt electrified by the weight of the words. I had assumed that the dark sky had some kind of finite ceiling, a limit, a boundary. Instead, the backdrop to the stars bottomed out and that unbendable certainty that I once felt imploded. I was bloodthirsty for the truth: I hunted through the library, the television channels, the minds of those around me. No one could provide me with some kind of coherent solution. Question led to question led to question, and all without answer. Most of all, why wasn't anyone else concerned with the answers to such questions? It took me a few weeks from the time I first cracked the spine of The Beginner's Guide to the Universe, burning through ideas like matches, constantly remolding the facts I had in front of me into some kind of understanding, that I realized the answer to many questions was beyond what was knowable. Imagination is not limitless. This realization allowed me to answer a single smoldering question. What is my role in a universe like ours? I am not going to live my life trying to catch smoke. I may be a little person on a small planet, and I may not know where the universe ends and where it began, but I am alive, with opportunities all around me, and that is enough. For this reason, I am not going to live passively, or hesitantly. I am hungry for life. I want to learn, to experience, to grow and to explore.
I am assured that my experiences in higher education will be rewarding ones. I refuse to let them not be. When I set my eyes on the horizon, it is hard not to be swept away by gratitude for my family, who supports me unflinchingly, for my teachers, who have replaced my empty mind with an open one, for my friends, for my freedom to learn and explore and make my own choices. My ideas about life may be right or wrong, but either way, I've got a golden state of mind. If I walk away, I will have learned this, if nothing else: what I am capable of.
