20 Comments »

1. why buying a website?
   lol.
   i love you.

   Comment by ur husband — October 21, 2005 @ 4:27 pm

   
   

2. Scott, That is a powerful essay indeed. Yours is an amazing story. My only suggestion is to add more about the epiphany. Why do you really want to go to school again? Why will you really be a success there? Why should the reader consider you as a potential successful student? Your essay is powerful, Scott, as is all of your writing. I very emotionally see where you have been and where you are, but I am not sure that I see where you are going as a student of Columbia University, and believe me, young man, I want to know that you have become a student of Columbia! Take care, Jerry

   Comment by Jerry Hanson — February 13, 2006 @ 8:34 pm

   
   

3. This is solid writing and well thought out with great vocabulary. But the end begs the question of what you wish to achieve with your education at Columbia? Have you any thought about the framework of your own future? In the future (as in when you are employed, perhaps at a large company), you will be required to think in advance for yourself and others regardless of your educational preparation; now is a good time to start thinking that way. I think you need to go a bit further here. Great start! Keep up the good work.

   Comment by Sue — February 13, 2006 @ 10:54 pm

   
   

4. Scott–it’s a pretty compelling story. In paragraph seven–shorten the sentence to “I was excited.” Eliminate the (for) in “He offered for me. Don’t say “I was in amazement” but “I was amazed. “Before NY “I had gone” not went.
   Also–like Sue suggests–you need a bit more transition from your life “on the lam” to thoughts of “expanding your intellect.” Finally,
   something about why you want to go to Columbia to
   study might be a good idea. Best of luck!

   Comment by Martin — February 14, 2006 @ 12:37 am

   
   

5. […] Any comments on the newest draft of my admissions essay, completed 15 minutes ago? I changed the ending around; I think the transition to needing college is better fleshed out now. Filed under: Misc | Comments: […]

   Pingback by scott anthony dot org » Food Service. — February 14, 2006 @ 1:47 am

   
   

6. Scott, I like it. Now it is the “hand of fate” that is in charge. Good luck, young man. Jerry

   Comment by Jerry Hanson — February 14, 2006 @ 1:54 am

   
   

7. One suggestion I might make is to be careful with flowery prose that might get you in trouble by making jumps in logic. For example:

   “A failure, though, was not on the short list of nouns I would use to describe that week. Actually, it was not on the list at all. The list was too full of words like spectacular, vibrant, and alive to even start to think of it as a failure.”

   While substituting “nouns” for “words” could provide a nice variety of vocab, you should take care to be consistent with your use: “spectacular,” “vibrant” and “alive” are adjectives (except for spectacular when used in the Moulin Rouge context, I suppose). Essay readers look for varied and extensive vocabulary, but they also look for those kinds of mistakes.

   Comment by Bradley — February 14, 2006 @ 2:22 am

   
   

8. I’d take note of Bobby’s comments most of which are right on the mark. Still need to correct “He offered me a chance” How about “he offered me a chance”. Still need something about Columbia
   at the end I think. Overall–improved.

   Comment by Martin — February 14, 2006 @ 4:18 am

   
   

9. k scott. i’ve gone over it and marked several things that you can consider. i’ve added them in bold, and emailed the whole thing back to you.
   basically, it’s a great bit of writing. but even great things can handle some polish

   Comment by tony — February 14, 2006 @ 9:45 am

   
   

10. wow. you did it a lot tougher than i realised, that first month. and what the hell happened “on a bar in my underwear, no less”? i hope you were drunk at the time; that might have mitigated the long-term impact a bit.
    Scott - i’ve suggested changes to a few words, some punctuation, and inserted a few where they were overlooked or lost when you did your own editing earlier. they’re all picky little things. i wouldn’t even begin to mess with the overall structure because that’s yours and you have built it well.
    ur essay is good, strong, and honest. By that i mean it comes across as a genuine statement of your feelings and experiences, expressed without unnecessary embellishment, but expressed with passion nonetheless.
    did i ever mention that i think you have a future as a writer?
    oh - one point i have to pull you up on: you wrote that the common theme in every reaction you got was that you couldn’t do it. that’s bullshit! i remember telling you to go for it, just make sure you had a buffer of dollars to tide you over the first month or so while you were finding your feet. But i guess a little bit of poetic licence is fine in an application to Columbia

    ____________________________________________________________

    September 5, 2004. Moving day. I lug my suitcases over to the baggage check at the Amtrak station. It’s nearing 1:15 in the morning; my train, the Crescent, departs from Charlotte at 1:49AM, and soon I will be en route to New York City. In slightly under thirteen hours, my life will begin.
    If you had told me I would be completing an application to Columbia University right now, I would have laughed. I would have been an emotional mélange of incredulity and disconcertedness. That was not the life I expected of myself; I wanted to be happy, to live young and free with no fear of the consequences. I didn’t want to go to college, to conform to the expectations of naysayers; I insisted on moving to New York, the city that chews you up and spits you out, and succeeding on my own terms.
    Somewhere during my junior year of high school, between AP English Language and Composition and tap dance lessons for extracurricular musical theatre productions, I started to get a nagging feeling in my stomach that something was not going right. I had no feelings. I was numb, and soon this numbness gave way to utter discontent. I started to spend every free moment–luckily, there were not that many–pondering over my life and THE fact that I was so unhappy.
    The problem was, I could pick a day and write down a list of activities, and that list would be indistinguishable from any other list I could create for any other day of my life. I felt like a robot, going to school, going to after-school activities, going to work, going home, going to the dinner table, going on the Internet, going to bed. In short, I was going through the motions.
    I got through the year—my grades didn’t suffer too much, amazingly—and that summer, I went on a weeklong trip to Manhattan with my friend, Nick. We stayed with Nick’s brother, Zack, in his cramped Astoria apartment for the duration of the vacation. Little HAD I REALISED [DELETE did I know it was] New York in July WAS characteristically unbearable in heat and humidity. The process of drying off after taking a shower left me drenched with sweat. Zack’s apartment had no air conditioning. The trip had all the makings of a failure.
    A failure, though, was not on the short list of ??nouns?? I would use to describe [you would be using mostly adjectives for that, wouldn’t you?] that week. Actually, it was not on the list at all. The list was too full of words like spectacular, vibrant [DELETE the comma] and alive to even start to think of it as a failure. I felt like I was home for the first time in my life as I walked around the East Village at two in the morning, surrounded by a million diverse faces.
    The train ride back home was one of the strangest experiences of my life. I was preoccupied by so many thoughts. I dreaded going back home, juxtaposing my week against my life thus far. I was excited. In my time in New York, I spent some time with an acquaintance/friend from North Carolina who attends the Juilliard School. He INVITED [DELETE offered for] me to move in with him if I came to New York. I was amazed at the fact that life existed, truly existed, outside of the only thing I had ever known. Before New York, I had gone on one trip in the entirety of my life, and I spent most of my time in San Diego at my aunt’s house. THAT [DELETE This] week [I would just say … opened my eyes - never mind epitomising phrases ] epitomized the phrase “eye-opening experience.”
    As my senior year of high school went on, my mind remained on New York. I continued my college-bound path of academia, took AP Statistics and AP Psychology, and earned a 1370 on my SATs. I seemed set for a life of higher education.
    The more I dwelled on New York, though, the more I wanted to be there. I had a job at Starbucks, one of the easiest companies with which to transfer across the country, and I saved my income from the company for a year. I asked myself, “Why not just move and work towards a management position in the city?” Logistically speaking, it seemed like a sound proposal. I would not have any college loans to pay off. I could support myself. [delete , seeing as how] Starbucks managers make more than new public school teachers in North Carolina; all I had to do was find a store and work harder than everyone else. Even if I was not there my whole life, I could easily find another retail job with my experience.
    When I told people about my master plan to move to New York City, I got one of two reactions: the first was doubt. People laughed and thought I was kidding about moving across the country by myself. They were sure I couldn’t do it.
    The second reaction was concern. Why would I throw away my convenient life and all of my grades and scholastic achievement to go make coffee in a strange and far off city? Those people said I was messing up my life. They were sure I couldn’t do it.
    I couldn’t do it. That was the common theme in every reaction that I got. Unsurprisingly, my nascent adolescent sense of rebellion did not take that negative reinforcement kindly. Doubters be damned, I was going to do it and succeed. I dreamed of laughing at them all during our ten-year high school reunion when my life was complex and successful and they were biding their time down in the South.
    I formulated a plan; I created an itinerary. I was going to visit New York again in February with my friend, a veteran New York City visitor with around twenty trips under his belt. I was going to see as many sights as possible and confer with my Julliard friend to figure out what he and I WERE going to do.
    January 4, 2006. I walked out of Starbucks in the early afternoon, having quit moments before. My manager was very unhappy as I had a board review for a promotion to an assistant manager position coming on February 1. How could I quit now after all of my hard work and progress? I told him he would never understand.
    From what you have read, you might presume that I set my mind on moving to New York, I moved in with my Julliard friend, transferred my job at Starbucks, and we all lived happily ever after.
    I wish it had been that easy. When I arrived at the Amtrak station, I called my “friend” to come pick me up as planned. He told me there was a problem. Now, standing at a payphone in the craziest city in the country–with three pieces of luggage far too heavy to carry a long distance–is not a place in which you ever want to hear that “there is a problem.”
    He told me that the apartment plan fell through. He told me he was really sorry, and that he could not even come to pick me up as planned because he had class. As I found out through the next month, my “friend” was a complete flake. He never said what he meant, and he never meant what he said. I had just never spent enough time with him to figure that out.
    Upon hanging up ON the Julliard flake, I called every New Yorker I knew or half knew from the Internet or as a friend of friends. Most of the people I called did not pick up their phones. I didn’t really blame them; I screen unfamiliar callERs, too. After a seemingly endless search, I finally got someone to let me stay with him for a few days, but he could not have anyone over until the next day. My first night in the city of my dreams, I slept on my suitcases in the train station.
    The rest of the month improved only just so. The guy who let me stay with him said that I could stay there until I found another place, and then three days later told me that I needed to leave by the next day because his parents were coming to visit. Luckily, I had gotten in touch with a few more people, and I leapfrogged from one apartment to another during the next few weeks. If my original definition of having a roof above my head meant that I was not homeless, I soon changed my perspective. I almost would have preferred to sleep outside as I stayed in the company of drug fiends and sex addicts, all of whom seemed to expect something FROM [DELETE out of] me. When whatever they wanted never materialized, the welcome mat vanished. I stayed in 10 apartments that first month. I was, for all intents and purposes, homeless. I was homeless and scared.
    My bullheadedness did not allow me to leave New York, however. I found an apartment at the eleventh hour, only after begging my future (and current) roommate to pick me in a plea worthy of a Daytime Emmy. I worked at Starbucks (luckily, I was never jobless). I went out, sneaking my way into clubs with those friends who would not pick me up at the station, but would gladly take me out until six o’clock in the morning.
    I got enamored [Merriam Webster says “usually used in the passive with of”] with club life, as any boy from a rural town (and I don’t think you can get [DELETE too] much more small-town than a Charlotte suburb named Huntersville) would. I went out five nights a week. I befriended many promoters, DJs, dancers, drag queens, and OTHER nightlife personalities. I started go-go dancing to supplement my food service job. Luckily, I was responsible enough to balance my work and play.
    As the year ended and 2005 went by in a blur, I started to feel uneasy. I thought back to that night in the train station in Charlotte, the ride up to the city, and the big dreams I formulated and finessed as I stared out the window into the blackness of the night. I had such huge plans for myself; I was going to do so many things. [that semi-colon was fine. but the sentences that follow need COLONS] I was going to become a master and connoisseur of New York’s nightlife; it happened. I was going to party until the sun came up; it happened often. I was going to go crazy and do things I never would do in North Carolina; it happened, on a bar in my underwear, no less. I was going to be a big hit at my job, finding success at all costs; it happened.
    Contrary to the saying of Robert Burns, I achieved my best-laid plans [actually, Burns wrote “schemes” in his poem To a Mouse. plans is commonly used now - but as you refer to Burns’s saying i think you should use his word ] ; [hey! enough of the semi/colons already! make that one a period ] I was doing exactly what I had wanted. I had made a pact with myself that I would find happiness at all costs, that I would not base my life on others’ expectations. I had packed more thrills into one year than people in Huntersville would have in their whole lifetime.
    It was the reminder of that pact that led to my recent epiphany, and led me to this application. As stated before, I came to New York because I felt numb. What proves ironic, then, is that after I achieved everything I hoped to accomplish when I arrived in that train station, I only felt numb again.
    I need to engage my brain. Thinking back to those rigorous high school classes - [the dash is a tad stronger as a pause than a comma] while I found them burdensome at the time, they left an indelible impression on my brain, one that I am unable to further ignore. After spending so much time performing menial tasks during the day and having hands stuck down my briefs during the night, I lost my construct of happiness.
    I realized that if I was living for my happiness, I needed to accept the fact that while MY PURSUIT [i think that works better than “the intended end”, with its unfortunate repetition of the “end” sound. and it sounds so… american?] of happiness will never change, the parameters it exists within most likely will, and will often. This is my chance to reengage my brain and build a framework for my future.
    *** Should you not say, briefly, why Columbia, specifically, would be important in reaching that end? And journalism, rather than marine biology? Or is that covered elsewhere in your application?

    Comment by tony — February 14, 2006 @ 9:55 am

    
    

11. sorry - the email addy i had for u backfired and u have no link on here (unless it is in disguise) that allows me to email the rich text version to you.
    hence my posting the whole damn think in comments. i’ll email it still, if u point me to the addy.

    Comment by tony — February 14, 2006 @ 9:57 am

    
    

12. I like the last sentence very much, Scott. Good luck. Jerry

    Comment by Jerry Hanson — February 14, 2006 @ 9:35 pm

    
    

13. Scott-I think you might be trying too hard. As a former admissions officer, I would suggest that you focus on telling your story–first and foremost. What has lead you to where you are and why do you want to go to college at this point versus right after college. I think this is a great start. However, I think you are currently a little “muddled-in-the-middle”. I also think that you are a bit too negative and I suggest that you reframe some of the negative experiences in to “it was tough but I learned from it and now I am stronger” — at a place where I am ready to learn from college and ready to apply what I have learned at Columbia. If you are interested in more comments just drop me an e-mail. Good luck!

    Comment by BustersDad — February 22, 2006 @ 11:30 am

    
    

14. […] My final draft on my Columbia essay can be found here. That’s all. I’m so tired of looking at it. Filed under: Misc | Comments: […]

    Pingback by scott anthony dot org » Homesick. — March 1, 2006 @ 3:51 am

    
    

15. Hey Scott,

    Great essay. I just have one thing: it may be a bit too long? As far as I remember, personal statements should be 4 pages max, double spaced. Other than that, great personal statement =)Good luck in your endeavor!

    Comment by eliz — March 2, 2006 @ 7:02 am

    
    

16. Your essay reads very well now! Nice work. I hope it proves persausive.

    Comment by Martin — March 4, 2006 @ 2:46 am

    
    

17. sorry, I couldn’t find an email address to email this to you….

    Dear fellow LGBT blogger, podcaster, vlogger:

    My name is Brad and I run a vlog at www.WillingWarrior.com.

    I need to start this letter by saying that I, like you, am hosted by DreamHost.

    As I’m sure you are well aware, our LGBT brothers and sisters are involved in quite a fight in Poland right now. There are groups, like Blood and Honor, that are actually providing names and information of people who are against the pro-nazi groups. A recent assault was obviously linked with the man’s presence on an Internet list called ‘Krew i Honor’ [Blood and Honor’] where Polish fascist organizations openly call for killing left-wing and gay activists. Although fascism is a crime in Poland, the police are unable to solve the problem since the server with the Web site is located in the U.S.A.

    By who? DreamHost.

    I was shocked to learn about it. I was even more shocked to learn that they want nothing to do with the discussion about not supporting the site. They stated in their last email-

    “We are aware of the site in question and the concerns surrounding the
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    So I have. I have filed with the FBI… but am not sure what will come of it. In the meantime, I am sending out this letter to everyone I can find in the gay community that is also hosting with DreamHost.

    Below is the contact information and a sample letter that I got from another website concerning this issue. I have let DreamHost know that this client is not pleased. I’m pretty sure that they will respond to you too.

    Thanks for your attention.

    Brad

    www.WillingWarrior.com

    The guy to contact at DreamHost is:
    DMCA Issues : [email protected]

    Dear Dreamhost,
    It has come to my attention that you are the web host of redwatch.info.

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    3 vl-5.r01.stngva01.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.27.190) 0.295 ms 0.347 ms 0.313 ms
    4 * xe-1-2-0.r20.asbnva01.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.2.84) 0.435 ms 0.459 ms
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    7 xe-4-1.r00.lsanca03.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.5.33) 71.934 ms 71.932 ms 71.916 ms
    8 xe-1-1.a00.lsanca17.us.ra.gin.ntt.net (129.250.29.115) 71.903 ms 71.957 ms 71.973 ms
    9 te-1-3.a00.lsanca17.us.ce.verio.net (206.183.201.162) 206.502 ms 158.285 ms 199.748 ms
    10 border1.po1-bbnet1.ext1a.lax.pnap.net (216.52.255.31) 72.082 ms 72.028 ms 72.075 ms
    11 newdream-1.border1.ext1a.lax.pnap.net (216.52.220.78) 121.273 ms 72.395 ms 72.116 ms
    12 basic-red.paramount.dreamhost.com (208.113.133.123) 73.854 ms 73.562 ms 73.526 ms

    Redwatch is an illegal site where I am viewing it (The United States) and where you are located (The United States). It posts personal information of people who share similar political views. The information is posted with the intention of causing physical harm to these individuals. The site owners are well aware of this. In fact, harm has been caused to various individuals including this most recent case where somebody was stabbed due to their information getting posted on redwatch:
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    Redwatch.info is violating these subsections of your Terms of Service:

    Customer may only use DreamHost Webhosting’s Server for lawful purpose. Transmission of any material in violation of any Country, Federal, State or Local regulation is prohibited. To this effect, child pornography is strictly prohibited as well as housing any copyrighted information (to which the customer does not hold the copyright) on DreamHost Webhosting’s Server.

    You have been hereby notified of the illegal activities occuring on your servers. You have been provided sufficient evidence regarding the illegal activities and violations of your terms of service. Refusal or neglect to remove these sites will result in further action which could result in prosecution for knowingly and willingly allowing criminal activities to occur on your server and criminal neglect. From this point on, you will be held responsible for any damage that occurs as a result of your hosting of these sites. You should forward any information you have on the website owners to the UN Human Rights Council, the FBI, and the New Scotland Yard. I will continue to pursue this issue until it is resolved.
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    Comment by Brad — June 27, 2006 @ 1:21 am

    
    

18. It’s odd, I feel almost as if a miniature version of you…I work at starbucks and I’m getting transfered to a new store when I go to school in two weeks, and I was overloaded with school activites (including doing three musicals at once topped with schoolwork and papers and forms for college…) this was inspiring to read, and I came across by total accident

    Comment by Eddie — August 20, 2006 @ 2:46 am

    
    

19. I enjoyed reading your story! I will call you in probably two years, when I finish my degree.. I’m probably going to NYC!! Maybe you’ll let me stay in for an entire week! )

    Comment by coxi — August 31, 2006 @ 8:28 am

    
    

20. Scott, you have an amazing determination. Keep it up. I am so happy for you. Good luck and be safe always.

    Comment by will — December 25, 2006 @ 4:58 pm

    
    

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