How to Get In to College: Steal This

Steal this essay. It might take a while before you “get it”, but you’ll get it. Use it as skeleton or in it’s unadulterated entirety for a meta-critique that indicates your blistering intellect.

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Broad, overreaching commentary about society. Witty backpedaling revealing hypercritical skepticism of aforesaid broad, overreaching commentary. Snide comment about believers in the aforementioned. Something about intellectuals, and how one has such a hard time of finding them around “these days.” Self referential comment that fails to mention why quotations were used around “these days”, because it is commonly acknowledged that any student of great intellectual fortune (i.e. the writer) would never for one second doubt the reader’s ability to detect irony, especially when in search of a college as prestigious and given to rigorous inquiry as ____________.

Acknowledgement of the tacit understanding between reader and writer that this whole process is bullshit, so it would behoove the college to just accept the writer and cut it with the Ivory Tower charade already.

Blasé comment about the college application process. A sentence explaining meta-awareness of behaviors undertaken by high school students specifically for the purpose of getting into a college as prestigious and given to rigorous inquiry as __________. Further backpedaling into an explanation of one such activity undertaken by the writer to get into a college as […] _____________. A sly intimation that the writer didn’t do this thing to get into college, it was, after all, for personal growth.

Self-aggrandizing explanation of overseas work with a nonprofit, the expenses of which experience were covered by upper-middle-class parents of Caucasian descent. Blanket generalization about the importance of service to one’s fellow human beings, even though said Earthly cohabiters weren’t as blessed by fate to have attended a college as prestigious and given to social service as ____________.

Something about the inherent value of everyone, and how the appreciation of such value can be developed through a liberal arts education, especially if undertaken at ___________. Commentary on the vulgarity of studying something practical, such as the art of money-getting, as an undergraduate. Tangential reference to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, because all undergraduate admissions committees 1) secretly fetishize Fitzgerald’s rendering of Jazz Age Princeton, and 2) cluck approvingly to each other at the writer’s potential consumption of Fitzgerald’s oeuvre beyond the obligatory Great Gatsby.

Witty, one sentence aside that is its own paragraph, proving a certain rakish flouting of formulaic writing that pegs one as very high school.

Blistering social criticism. Self-righteous denouncement of the mainstream media and its pandering to the stupid. A statement decrying the death of print, a ridiculous comment on how reading frees the mind, summed up by an overdramatic implementation of Paine’s “Give me liberty, or give me death!” speech. Ironic, condescending analysis of the reference, and how some bloviating, less-gifted individual might use it in earnest.

Ridiculous statement about how the death of unashamed references to the Latin language is concomitant to the death of higher order thought. Conciliatory ending about how, in actuality, the writer sympathizes with Mr. Paine, in so many words, and wishes to liberate his/her mental capacity through a liberal arts education at __________.


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  1. […] How to Get Into College: Steal This (August 23, 2010) […]

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