College 101
Common App 5: Accomplishment or Event
The Prompt
Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.
The Essay
Intro
Talent is not remarkable. It's usually the first thing anyone compliments. "You're so talented." It doesn't mean what they think it means. It doesn't mean I worked hard. It means I was lucky, or blessed, or anything else you want to call it.
I have talent. I've known since I was old enough to hold a football. The game just makes intuitive sense to me. The pathways of the players, both my team and the others, where the ball has to go, and what I'm doing. In the silence before a snap, I'm already playing out what is going to happen, watching the holes in my lines, tracing the route of my receivers.
That I would make varsity was a foregone conclusion. It was still a major part of growing up. We're a football town. We eat football, we breathe football, we live football. For me to be anything less than varsity was unthinkable, but when I made it, I found something I wasn't quite expecting: it wasn't enough.
Body
I was thrilled, of course. My parents were happy. My coach was pleased. I was looking forward to representing the town and my school on the field. I knew that with my formidable talent, I was going to roll over the other team. If this were a movie, I would have been brought down to size. At least a loss, if not a bad injury. This wasn't a movie. We won by twenty-two points.
It's difficult to learn from success, but that was what happened. After the game, I didn't have the normal flush of success, where my body feels warm and my hands feel jittery, when the aches deepen into something almost pleasant. I felt hollow, and I wasn't sure why. It wasn't until the next two victories, both of them blowouts, that I did.
In every situation, I had the same non-reaction. I wondered why I wasn't enjoying our victories. The whole purpose of stepping onto the field, after all, is victory. That's when I realized victory wasn't the purpose, at least not for me.
Varsity was my goal for so long that I had forgotten the rest. I've always been told to play the game in front of you. In other words, don't think about next week's game, or next month's. In that, I had forgotten that varsity football, as important as it is—to me, to my family, and my town—is only one step along the path.
I need to play well enough to get a scholarship to college, or else I'm not going. For someone with my natural talent, anything less than the pros is a failure. That might be harsh, but based on everything I've seen, it's true. I learned that this transition to adulthood was less of a smooth transformation and more of one of a number of steps along the way.
Conclusion
It is far too easy to view talent as an excuse. For me, it is a motivator. For my talent, I will accept nothing less than a dream that only a tiny percentage of people ever get to experience. To get there, I'm willing to work hard and wring every last accomplishment from myself.
Talent is a responsibility. Because you had nothing to do with acquiring it, you are compelled to achieve every last bit you can with it. While I had grown used to thinking varsity would be it, that was not the case. Now, I can focus on the goal while I accomplish the steps.
I had become used to thinking of victory as a goal rather than what it is: a process. To get it, you have to live to your absolute potential. I can only give it my best, and hope that I'm worthy of the gift I have inside.
Why This Essay Works
Oftentimes, inexperienced writers try to mask their awkwardness with writing by using a lot of big words. This is a mistake. The goal is to sound like yourself, only better. While the student here uses a few words on the larger end, at no point does it sound like they were writing by way of a dictionary.
The intro sets up the student's problem well: what they had thought of as a goal was, in fact, a process. It takes them the body and the conclusion to reach the point, but it is a salient point. It's very easy to get blinded to what your true goals should be. In this case, the writer does not want to rest, content in a lesser victory.
The idea of talent as a responsibility, which the writer states in the conclusion, is a big one. They give enough support for the idea, and it shows that they are perhaps more introspective than one might imagine a football player to be. This is not some talented athlete, smug in their natural-born abilities. This is an undeniably talented individual who looks at their gift as a way to compel themselves to greater heights.