To whom it may concern,
I’m not going to lie to you. I have come off a shoddy four years of college. Oh, I graduated, yes, and I kept my GPA above a 3.0 thus securing my scholarship for the entirety of my college education, but… You want to know what I did that was so outstandingly spectacular? You want to know what new life experiences I obtained while acquiring a degree? You want to hear I wrote for the university newspaper, took summer abroad trips to Spain, and made the dean’s list every semester? Well, I’m sorry, but that’s not at all how my life went in college. That’s not to say I wouldn’t have liked for it to have gone that way, no. Because in hindsight, and things are always so clear in hindsight, I would have wanted exactly that. I would like to sit here and tell you how exceptional my brain is, how my prose is so crisp and invigorating it makes reading a literary criticism feel like reading the clutches of a well-composed mystery novel. And maybe that used to be true, but I lost myself in college, and I think it’s taken graduating and getting out of the system for a while to truly understand why I need to go back.
You see, I didn’t take the opportunities I should’ve taken as an undergrad. I didn’t get involved. I thought my job was more important than my academics. I’m actually glad that I was wrong. But I can’t regret how it turned out, because then I wouldn’t have learned what I know now: the dangers of my faults. I fed my emotions through college. I let myself feel sorry and cast out. I did all the damaging things you can do to yourself while matriculating without getting thrown out or failing. I told myself college wasn’t for me. I nearly quit. Maybe my parents like to think their anger was the reason I stayed, but the will to keep going came in the voice of my best friend. “You have to stay in school,” she said. “Not just because it’s what everyone says when someone wants to drop out, but because you will honestly regret it if you don’t.” I trusted her knowledge after she decided to go back to school after a 12-year break, so I kept going, I kept writing, even when I didn’t feel at all committed to the acts.
It was in doing this, though, that I found the disappointment in myself. It really doesn’t hit you until you’ve done something about which you feel ashamed and regretful. That’s when you see your revelations clearly. “I need to keep going, keep writing,” I said to myself. “I can’t see myself doing anything else.” I can’t explain the pull of the university: the atmosphere of students bustling from this class to that, their heads floating in windows over notes and books as they study at the cafe, the camaraderie of those who are eager to learn and trade ideas like baseball cards (do kids still do this?). But I see myself perched on a bench in the twilight of a day, freshman year, when I worked to capture the cast and pull of the fountain in front of the library. That was a night preserved in a journal I kept with me throughout my first year of college. That was the night I wanted to keep living. That was a night I lost hold of. That was a night I’ve been trying to get back ever since.
Mostly my statement of purpose is one of immersion. I want to immerse myself: in books, art, literature, students – all the things that make up college. I want to gain the experience I disallowed myself as an undergraduate who didn’t know any better than to fight herself on what there is to be known about life. I wanted to pull through it as though I’d already acquired all the answers. I’ve learned the hard way that life isn’t about shutting yourself out and quailing away from the arks. It is about taking the chunks of wood that get thrown at you and making something sustainable out of them. It is about being a Lorelei Gilmore, a Harry Potter, a Jane Eyre, a Jesus. It is about immersing yourself into the life you seek and the life you’ve been given. It is also about immersing yourself in the knowledge of knowing the difference between the two – in accepting when the time isn’t right, in acting when the time is.
With greatest hopes,
Lauren