My college
admissions essay said it all — if only I had stopped and listened to myself at
the time. I was more concerned with finding a hook that would set me apart from
the tens of thousands of other applicants, who were, of course, trying to do
the same thing.
At my
affluent public high school, potential pre-meds and Wall Streeters (yes, at age
17) lined the hallways. Foreign languages were a more unlikely passion. So I
seized on that, choosing to narrate my journey from middle-school Francophilia
to full-blown foreign grammar nerd.
Looking
through the brochures accumulated on endless campus visits, I didn’t find many
schools that offered bachelor’s degrees to people who studied a random
assortment of languages, and wanderlust made me reluctant to choose one. But
most offered a major in something called linguistics. Maybe by professing my
appetite for such a charmingly obscure course of study, I could win over the
admissions officers.
To
demonstrate that I actually knew what “linguistics” meant, after a cursory
glance atWikipedia I wrote a closing paragraph that went: “What is the
psychology behind language? How and why did different languages develop? More
specifically, why do children automatically assume that the past tense of ‘go’
is ‘goed’ when they have never heard adults use anything but ‘went’? These are
questions that fascinate me.” And so when asked for my tentative major, I
filled out Linguistics, Code 638, on my applications.
SOURCE: THE NEW YORK TIMES. EDUCATION.
No comments:
Post a Comment