How i got into 6 colleges?

DeSales: I hate you.

“This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper,”
A quote from “The Hollow Men,” by T.S. Eliot, was scrawled slightly askew on the whiteboard. I, in my awkward uncultured sophomore state, found myself amongst the school’s “Lit Maggots,” members of a Literary Magazine club I had not known the existence of till that Tuesday afternoon.
I can ever so delicately describe that day’s first prompt write as one of the most horridly cliché things I’ve ever created. It was however, as I remember it, the starting “gun shot” of my writing frenzy and the constant shortage of ink in my pens. There never seemed to be enough resources to capture the words I desperately had to get on paper. Math notes, my agenda book, old receipts, and even body limbs quickly became volumes of poetry. Of course, none of it was running for the 2007 Nobel Prize.
Junior year was a turning point in my style. I got off the poetry turnpike and merged into short stories. I picked the brain of Ms. Brobst as often as possible in my Creative Writing class. Each story seemed to be under constant construction. Nothing was ever finished, only abandoned after multiple seemingly perfected drafts.
Then, in my final year at Parkland High School, I was able to take part in Creative Writing Independent Studies and AP English. I had the privilege of writing along side of my best friend, Sydney. Together we were editors of the Literary Magazine, and even collaborated to write a one act play that was performed at West Chester University last fall.
Overall I don’t exactly think of myself as a writer just yet. I feel as though I cannot give myself such a label, or any label for that matter. I am more or less just trying my best to effect and let myself be effected. I look for inspiration from the mundane and I seek to create beauty within normalcy, therefore the only label I own is “myself,” and I promise i’m only getting better at it.

TEMPLE: So far a day hasn't gone by that i don't regret loosing you.

Holloring into dew,
I speak to the molding air,
I could be Purple.
I remember innocence, the days when I would squander my time, wishing on every shooting star and folded potato chip that I could find. Crossing my fingers and earnestly blowing out birthday candles, I went through my years begging for seemingly inaccessible dreams to come true. I wanted to be Cat Woman, Tiger Lily, Mia Hamm, and good at spelling. What I wanted most, however, was to be Purple. Most of these goals changed as the irrational thoughts of my youthful mind developed new ambitions. Super powers were out of the picture and training Seeing Eye dogs popped in. Being Peter Pan’s best friend shifted into traveling the world. Professional soccer dissolved into communication with the deaf world. Yet, I still held on to the dreams of correct spelling and becoming Purple.
Here I am, writing in my favorite café, across from the wall mural I painted last spring, and realizing that through my experiences, and despite still spelling phonetically, I have actually met my criteria for the color purple. I have thrown myself into the media pool and dispersed myself as album cover art, advertisement posters, and, most prominently, illustration.
Not only have I sprawled out in the commercial art area but I have also gone and seen the world. With my travels I melted myself down; liquefied and then re-solidified into ethnically customized shapes; no one nation can claim me. Using cultures and knowledge gained, I created an intensification of my original components, the primary colors. Temple University gave me the red, the passion for life, art, and education. Pennsylvania gave me the blue, pure will power combined with prime locations, Parkland High School, Bethlehem, Philadelphia, and Allentown. So, just look for me. I am between all things warm and all things cool, red and blue, wherever you see purple.

MODIFICATION: Most children, at some point, take the time to call upon to the shooting stars, folded potato chips, wish bones, and birthday candles; with fingers crossed they wish for seemingly inaccessible dreams to come true. Ignorant adults these dependent miniature people deceitful atrocities, neglecting to read the small print dragged along with “You can be anything you want when you grow up.” There happens to be a strict formula and guideline for what that anything entails.
So here we see them, leaping off their beds and claiming super hero powers, waiting by the window for their Hogwarts’ acceptance letter and in my case broadcasting to the world, “I could be purple.” Though, such ideas have recently become tangible and perhaps it appears as though our societies ambitions aren’t so far-fetched after all.
Ten years post graduation and I find myself swimming victory laps in the realization that I have actually met the criteria for the color purple (though not literally a lupine flower, a plum, Aussie Shampoo Bottles, or bruises.) I have dived into the media pool and dispersed myself as album art, advertisement posters, and most prominently illustration. I am even the wall mural in the café down the block, earning me unlimited free refills, much needed and routinely taken advantage of.
Within the early years of becoming purple I strived to separate myself from the other colors, realizing that they had all chosen specific nationalities to represent. I traveled, and in doing so, I melted myself down; liquefied and then re-solidified into culturally adapted shapes. Only to discover that through such travels and sculptured forms I consistently held the original components. The primaries: Red (the education and passions developed at Temple University) and blue (the metaphysical psychological “first ray” of pure will-power.) I am Purple.


RUTGERS: always have a back up plan... soccer (USED THE SAME ESSAY FOR PRATT+ARCADIA)

Although not currently involved, for seven years my family took in fostercare children through KidsPeace, opening our home up to adolescents going through times of crisis. I consider myself to have had over 20 siblings come in and out of my own childhood. Some of the kids have remained in contact with my family while others have vanished into new lives completely.
My past has greatly impacted my views of hard situations I come across. Knowing what true-life trails are and witnessing mere children make it through them changed me. This opportunity to become imbedded as the normality and sanctuary of so many kids as enforced the realization that for the rest of my life I want to be that face in the crowd that they know will always be there for them. My family allowed each of those kids to feel what it was like to be cared for and to know what a true home feels like. I think, being only in my elementary and middle school years, I did as much as I could to help raise their standards of life and to show them what it was like to be able to just play and be a kid. To this day I still feel compelled to teach and inspire other people, especially children.
I look forward to utilizing my talents and passions to inspire or help the people around me. I have been taking Sign Language classes for four years now and deeply involved with my school’s ASL Club for three of those years. This year I am now the clubs Vice President and initiated into the ASL National Honors Society. I have interpreted at the Baum School of art and I have been teaching at the elementary school for two years now through Parklands EWLE program. This month I start teaching a deaf and illiterate refugee girl Bor Meh. I intend to help promote awareness of the Deaf world as well as help bridge the gab between those hearing and non hearing.
Communication is everything to me. It was through the Literary Magazine Club that I discovered my passion for writing. Starting in my sophomore year, my math notes, agenda book and even body limbs quickly became volumes of prose and poetry. During my junior year of high school my creative writing class attended DeSales University’s poetry festival. I hadn’t expected to be recognized out of the 200+ students, but my poem Graphite Garden received an honorable mention presented by Dr. Stephen Myers. Now, in my senior year, I find myself deeply immersed in literature, taking an independent studies creative writing course, AP English, as well as immersing myself in the Literary Magazine Club as its Editor. I have realized that words have the potential to change lives. Great writers such as Miranda July, Margaret Atwood, and George Orwell have pushed minds into uncharted territory, and warping them to greater a greater understanding of themselves. Overall, I’m just trying to inspire people to think differently. I want to create meaning in the mundane and beauty within everything that has ever been overlooked.
I believe that everyday is a chance to meet new people or try new things. I intend to effect as many people in a positive way as I can. Weather it through years of companionship or just a brief moment of help, through language, literature, or just action, I want to be the familiar and remembered face in the crowd, the difference and the change.

NH Institute of art: just too small and cold.
Art is a risk, an impacting grotesque or beautiful captivating idea given to the world in physical form. It was not until this past summer that I realized I didn’t have to throw out my outlandish ideas or ignore my ongoing need to create. Understanding where art is and what it does changed my perceptions and possibilities for the future. Everyone sees art from the second they wake up, till the moment their eyelids droop at night. Everything has at one point been passed through the hands of an artist. My coffee mug, my toothbrush, my sneakers, the house I walk out of, and the school I walk into, have all been artistically influenced at some point in their production. For as much art and design that is in the world, I’ve been told that only 5% of the population can actually create it.
I want to be part of that 5%. The New Hampshire Institute is merely the first step. I have been able to develop creativity, originality, and imagination on my own from the day I was born. However, if foundations and techniques aren’t learned, practiced, and well established any innovation or style is lost. I’m looking for a school that will pass on all they know and allow me to exploit as many resources, mediums, knowledge, or experience offered out to me. Till just this year I found myself struggling with the possibility of an education in art. I had pre-established the notion that art was not a job option. Getting a BFA would simply mean subjecting myself to a career in constant rejection and debt. “Starving artist” was not in the cards, or paints if you will.
Often I find that I’ll suddenly become enveloped by an idea, only to realize half way through that I can’t properly portray the things I want. I hope to utilize the things I learn at the New Hampshire Institute in order to create album artwork, promotional posters for movies or musical artists as well as delve into all aspects and genres in illustration.
Currently I derive my inspiration from almost any aspect of the world around me. I believe that the things that prod my train of thought along can be anything from a orange pealing, oriental carpets, Regina Spektor lyrics, or even the cracks between floor tiles. If I could do one thing only for the rest of my life it would be to turn every single mundane or ugly thing and warp other peoples’ perspectives of it till it becomes an object of reflective insight and beauty. “Anything plain can be lovely.”

Dixie Cups

Whispers into paper cups dance across a string, stretched between your brick box and my brick box, a black hole gap in our 7th street Galaxy. Cradling some “you can be anything,” fallacy, -we were just kids hiding in space where sleeping adults lost satellite reception. Trained by culture in the art of deception, an unleashed reality barked howled at the moon from our ally. Released by me, free to roam through the concept of innocence and in_a_sense freed from the disease of “Grow Up!” the plague of living by a five-paragraph format. Outlined lives defined by the three body points, Intro: reformed, thesis: refined, drafted till the inevitable foreclosure of your creative mind.
Long before the conclusion was stated and the planets aligned you were nothing more than a reflection of your childhood shine. Plastering “for sale” signs up on our dreams we sold our souls to The Man. You’ll never be more than a machine, well oiled by stress, fueled by caffeine, pivoting day after day between this brick box and a concrete cube down the block where you sit in your shift just watching the clock count off the hours and a nine and two cent rate. “Penny for a thought,” but only when the proper forms are signed on that spacious black flat line reminding me of what your brain waves will look like in time.
Do you remember when we whispered sublime dreams into Dixie cups and sent our secrets through stolen string? The fear of your sister as she screamed, yanking back what was once her favorite sweater, now laced between your window ledge and my window ledge. She stole our ability to dream of universe with no edge. Stuffing our fingers into our ears we sing, “LA, LA, LA! I can’t here you,” and somehow later we find ourselves locked in by rubrics and deadlines wanting but unable end an Essay with ‘BUT’ ‘AND’ ‘OR… some other conjunction, so that every sentence is just another introduction. Allow the possibility for infinite more construction, disregard grammatical punctuation and release your inner child’s fanatical imagination. Be the start of a new generation in creation. Leaving all your words out there for free interpretation. Break out of this interstellar planetary rotation. - Make of me what you will And…

some basic math...

I most definitely believe in signs, that is to say I believe that in order to reduce the chance of dying from some sort of stress-induced heart attack, that ladybug that just crawled up my leg means one of two things. Either I can now expect myself to have the heebie-jeebies for at least five minutes because a bug just touched me, or that horrible string of misfortune I have been fighting through all week is most certainly about to dissipate. I began to use this method for determining my mental status around the time that I bought my first vehicle. I bought the GPS first, named her Dorothy, and the car second. It was a Mitsubishi Lancer and more specifically the OZ Rally Edition with 92,222 miles on it. Two is my lucky number and well... Dorothy was looking for the wizard of OZ, so I signed the check and have been following the Yellow Brick Road ever since. My most recent dilemma has me faced with the task of finding an apartment to live in. After two months of countless tours of stained carpets and yellowed ceilings led by stringy-haired landlords, and no sign, I am debating whether the added privacy, cheaper price, and and the aptitude for me to maintain my job, are really worth it.
I thought I had found a place, a quaint victorian home in Fountain Hill. Sure, there may be an abandoned gas station down the block and a couple gangs in the next town over, but the second I stepped onto the wrap-around porch and looked out over the white iron railing, all i thought about was the neighbor’s lawn gnomes and the edge of a yellow brick road. It is just ten minutes from my college campus, two minutes from my favorite coffee shop, 15 minutes to my job, and 18 minutes to my figure drawing class. I would not have to share a bathroom with three other annoying teenage girls, and I would not have to listen to them complain about their boyfriends, their classes, or about how the obnoxious TV that they leave on all night is only playing Friends reruns.  Some nights I do not get to leave work until two in the morning. When I arrive home there is never the worry that I will wake someone up with my intense and skillful gourmet toast making.  College dorms, with their thick cold walls and funny smelling desks drawers, is not an ideal habitat, especially when it costs thirteen thousand dollars.
It just takes basic math skills to determine that living off campus and paying a monthly rent can save thousands of dollars. Even with the price of gas, groceries, and electricity, the fee is easily justifiable when paralleled to the expense of its counter part, the idealized “college campus life.” Though all the signs keep saying “there’s no place like home,” one part is just not adding up. In order to move in I must sign this man Kasper’s lease form.  It is extremely difficult to do when he wont return my phone calls or emails, it has been two weeks since he originally told me the place was mine for the taking and I have learned that it is, in fact, impossible to sign a form when that form does not exist. Do I stray from the yellow path and start up the futile hunt on Craig’s List all over again, or do I wait it out?
At this juncture I am so exhausted by the task of finding a home that I am overwhelmed with jealously of all the students living in that thick cold-walled room, with its funny smelling desk drawers, and its propensity to contain four teenage girls who somehow manage to not peel each other's flesh off. Is thirteen thousand dollars the price to pay to not have to deal with the stress of apartment hunting, or is the stress of debt the price to pay for not having the will power to hold onto a space of my own? Someone send me a sign.