The Real Me

When I finally got down to writing my admissions essays, I managed to create several essays that both displayed my greatest character traits, and failed to disclose my shameful side.

Which demonstrates that even in situations where I must expose disgraceful character traits, the tone and attitude of my writing can still be directed towards an optimist approach. With my college admissions essays, I wrote conservatively and with the purpose of being admitted to a university. For instance, if I submitted an essay on how my life changed when I got out of drug rehabilitation or how I my greatest influence is a high school dropout, I would reveal a weakness in my personality. The college admission office could never truly understand what kind of person I was unless I had opened up and expressed my true uninhibited emotions and wrote about myself without reservation. In my academic writing, I have always taken into account who I am writing for and for what purpose. What confuses me is how all the admissions prompts were always geared towards topics that required me to write about my "greatest" or "inspiring" traits. In my past writings, I had always written exactly what I had felt, regardless of how controversial the issue, because my target audience was always a high school English teacher and not a college admissions officer. Shameful personality traits are pieces of my life that would have misguided the effectiveness of my essays.

Colleges did not really want to know everything about me, but were only out to discover my good qualities. Of course I could never have written this way if I wanted to remain competitive in the admissions game.