College 101
Common App 3: Challenging Beliefs
The Prompt
Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?
The Essay
Intro
It's pretty easy to think you already know everything. Yet beliefs can exist inside of you that you don't remember consciously making, like old files on a computer that somehow avoid being purged. Eventually, I had to do a little mental house-cleaning, if only because there's only so much space in my mind and I have a math test on Friday I would very much like to pass.
This leads me to the entire concept behind belief. Recently, on social media, a friend remarked (about an issue) that it was "just their beliefs." It doesn't really matter what the issue was, or what hinged on my friend's beliefs. What got me to thinking was the word itself.
"Belief" is one of those words we throw around without thinking about it. It tends to be the way people finish arguments rather than start them—when they stop thinking of an issue as opposed to analyzing them. This casual remark by my friend made me challenge the whole idea behind the word itself.
Body
The first step was looking it up in the dictionary, and came up with "a feeling that something is good, right, or valuable." While on the face of it, this definition would seem to put everything to rest, it spurred more reflection on it. Namely, the one question we've all been asking since we learned how to speak: "Why?"
Specifically, why is this thought to be good, right, or valuable? For one thing, beliefs are not constant between cultures. They are not even constant in the same culture. If they were, no one would ever have to inform another that they thought or said something due to their beliefs. It would be known intuitively as everyone had the same ones.
What about any particular concept, idea, or action, would make it good, right, or valuable? "Right" is the most concrete of these words. While correctness is hard to determine, whether or not something is factually true has a whole subject devoted to it: science. I didn't think that science would tell me if something is "good," but "valuable," maybe. Living organisms have needs, and thinking ones have other needs. Fulfilling those demonstrates value.
Science is also intended to be predictive. The goal is to figure out how things will react in the future, and through that create things like self-driving cars or microwave burritos that don't burn the roof of your mouth. By predicting a course of action, i.e.: "This burrito is hot and could burn me," it can then figure out why and propose a solution.
Conclusion
I went back to the original post to see if my newly minted definition of belief would be valuable. As it turned out, this whole debate was on Star Wars. So science, or being predictive, rational, or much of anything didn't help at all.
Or so I thought. Because it didn't fall into these categories, I was able to look at it with clear eyes. The debate over it was just that: a debate. There was nothing predictive in either side. There was nothing concrete. An argument that people got pretty worked up for, and invoked their beliefs to settle, ended up being completely empty.
I was happy to challenge my definition of belief. Now that I know what it is, I can utilize it. My worldview can be a rational one, except when it's not. And when it's not, I'll know why. One thing, it's already saved me time arguing on the internet, and if that's not valuable, I don't know what is.
Why This Essay Works
The student takes the question in an interesting direction from the beginning. By challenging even the wording of it, the writer is looking for a deeper meaning. In many cases, words are taken as a given, and it's the rare person who really seeks what they mean. This is someone who doesn't take things for granted, and approaches even the wording of questions with strong critical thinking skills.
This is also an interesting journey into the psyche of the student. Most belief systems go unchallenged, and here the student's taking an offhanded debate over a movie as an invitation to construct one from the ground up. This shows that the writer is an introspective person, but also has a solid chain of logic to support their beliefs.
The final reveal—that this was entirely on the back of a movie debate—adds a little levity. Things were getting a little stiff, and just that bit of humor provides some relief. It's not a joke line, and that's important. A simple joke might not land, but that truth grounds the entire essay in reality and should give the reader a bit of a smile.