College essays that made a difference - Princeton Review 2010
Mieko Y. Beyer
The applicants
Mieko served on the editorial staff of her high school’s literary magazine and as an officer in the Quizbowl Club. She won awards in Latin and played tennis on her school team. She also spent a year abroad in Japan.
Stats
SAT: 1390 (740 Critical Reading, 650 Math)
High School GPA: 93.0 (out of 100)
High School: Orchard Park High School, Orchard Park, NY
Hometown: Orchard Park, NY
Gender: Female
Race: Asian American/Caucasian
Applied To
Boston University
Columbia University—Columbia College
Loyola University New Orleans
New York University
Smith College
State University of New York at Buffalo
State University of New York College at Purchase
University of Chicago
Essay
Mieko used the following essay in her applications to BU, Chicago, Columbia, Loyola, NYU, and Smith.
Chicago’s application asked applicants to compose their own essay question. Mieko proposed the following: Due to internal and/or external weirdness, sometimes you may feel like you just don’t belong. A commonly heard reaction to an individual’s weirdness may be, “Are you from a different planet or something?” Now, there are those who react with offense or jest, but there are others for whom this comment triggers deep introspection. (Am I from a different planet?). Suppose you are the second sort of person, describe how you found out about your alien status and what your home planet is like.
I don’t think normality is overrated. I think it must actually be a very nice sensation. Because normality isn’t who you are, it is how you feel. Normality to me is a sense of belonging.
Certain things commonly indicate your ease at belonging; our physical appearance is oftentimes the best indicator.
I am perfectly healthy, my mom brags about how she used no anesthesia when giving birth to me. Yup, my existence was pure from the moment I left the womb. I am average weight, height, looks, coloration.… everything! I can run, not too fast, but not too slow. I can lift heavy things, but not really heavy things. You know, just healthy. I am average smart too, I even had tests done to prove it (you have them for your perusal).
But alas, I am strange.
How did this happen? Am I a genetic oddity? All of my physical and mental categorizations show that I should feel comfortable in my life … but I do not.
Oh, not in a bad way! I love everyone, and I don’t want to die. I am just, odd. The worst thing is to look normal, have people act to you as they would any normal person, and then have to offend their efforts with your abnormalities.
I have always been aware of these things, and I have now gotten to the bottom of it; I am an alien.
Once, in childish play, my sister performed tests on me, to determine what species I was. It was a rigorous procedure where I tried talking to animals, telekinesis, taste tests, tree-climbing, and was timed at being silent. All results indicated, according to my sister, that I was indeed an alien. That’s a pretty strange childhood memory. Even more strangely though, the FBI seized those records from my then nine year old sister. Then they tagged me on the bottom of my foot, telling my parents that it was “for my own protection.”
I am greatly influenced by my family’s way of regarding my eccentricities. They smile indulgently at me as they pull a jar of kosher pickle spears from a grocery bag, “Guess what we got for you Mieko!” And when they told stories of our perils to relatives, it was always “Mieko who, strange child, was riding down the stairs in a laundry basket for fun.” When I got stitches, on my knee cap, on my nose-bridge, on my brow bone, it wasn’t treated with worry, but with chuckles and knowing nods. I always found this interesting, because shouldn’t those abnormalities be washed out of a child? My friend used to eat her own hair, so her mother would tie her hair in tight French braids all the time. I have never seen her chew her hair since. Why didn’t my parents refuse to buy me pickles? Why didn’t they take away the laundry baskets? Why didn’t they dress me up in protective equipment to prevent lacerations? I think I know why. My alien core shined through and they realized resistance was futile. Everyone knows the saying, “You can’t make a sow’s ear into a silk purse.” I am a sow’s ear.
I’ll try to envision my home—planet, my people, by taking the opposite version of all my sources of discomfort here. Basically, they come down to two major things, sharp edges and sporadic verbal outbursts.
I think on my planet we are all amorphous putty. We hover approximately 1 to 2 feet in the air, energetically floating around mazes of compartments and chattering weirdness. Some compartments are just like Earth, offices, apartments, stores, etc. But the rest are unique to my planet. There are Laughing rooms and there are Sighing rooms. They are self-explanatory. The two categories make up the range of emotion found on the planet outside of Contemplation. Contemplation is carried out in the caudal end of our bodies, and can be detached, almost like an intellectual fart, and dispersed like one. However, it has no odor, and is very pleasant to happen upon.
I really do love your planet; I think it might actually suit me better than my native one. By encasing my being in the more structured human form, it limits the degree of damage I can do. My sudden bursts of thought on my planet might have caused a tidal wave of cogitative emittances that might have wrought physical destruction. Here, I must take the time to laboriously write them down or articulate them in speech (though sometimes I do tend to babble very randomly) by which time the power of the thought is weakened by my other physical efforts. Here on Earth, one’s thoughts must be first manifested physically outside the mind to have any effect on the environment at all It was Emily Dickinson who realized this signature mode of Earthling thinking when she wrote “A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day”
Despite all my complaints about feeling a bit alienated sometimes by my er, alien origins, I realize that having a streak of weird on an otherwise ordinary human form isn’t a bad thing, but just another part of me. I guess it’s not as bad as I thought at first, because you know what? Everyone is an alien somewhere. The next time someone says to me “Are you from a different planet or something?” I think I will say to them “Yes, and on my planet, I’d say to you ’Are you from a different planet or something?’ ”
See this page to find out where this student got in.