10 Topics To Avoid In A College Admission Essay

10 Topics To Avoid In A College Admission Essay The most beautiful things in the world are ideas, constantly changing, altered by experience and learning. I am unable to say that any one book is important to me, all I can say is that Catch-22 is important to me today and hope to discover the book that will be important to me tomorrow. I invite St. John’s to help me find that book, and perhaps I will be able to help someone else find their’s. War Satire as a sub-genre is of particular importance. The seriousness of war, literally life and death, makes it a subject people tend to develop core values around. I can’t look at it without a wave of nausea and fascination crashing over me. If you flip through the book now, you can see the pages I gripped so tightly that they tore. In contrast, if my copy of Don Quixote didn’t have footnotes, I would be quite lost. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, in addition to contributing to our modern language, is the most accurate depiction, I have encountered, of life in the Air Force. As absurd as the previous exchange was, it happened. Great literature forces the reader to identify with the characters. I think we’ve all had a situation in which we have identified with the protagonist of this story and had experiences with people exemplified by the other characters in this book. In Plato’s Meno (thanks for sending!), Socrates posed an ingenious question to his student about how to double the area of a square. The student intuited that one would simply double the side lengths of the square but in reality that would quadruple the area of the square. Socrates then leads the student though a series of understandable steps proving that in order to double the area of a square, one must construct a square with the side length of the diagonal of the original square. In times of strife, I would often revisit these myths, using them to process and understand the stress of my young life. To clarify, my response was not a result of any past trauma. My visceral reaction to Lolita remains a mystery to me. The words manifested in my body, and remain there today. After reading Lolita, my brother and I spent the following days dissecting every minute detail, trying to find some kind of understanding of Lolita. We searched together for insight, sat up late after dinner arguing about whether or not Humbert loved Dolores, and what the final meeting between Humbert and Dolores meant. My experience of Lolita is intrinsically connected to the discussions I had with my brother. Lolita inspired in me a fervent hunger for discussion of truth. By the time high school rolled around, that girl was nowhere to be found. These seditious thoughts that break the myth of glory, and prevent unnecessary sacrifice are of great value if we are to have a society comprised of critical thinkers. Such a society is necessary if the poor are to overcome the effects of media and politicians made up of and owned by the wealthy. Catch-22 speaks to me because I don’t have the combat experience many people associate with military service. It spends most of its pages describing the time between combat, the little absurdities that make up the majority of time in the military, with very short bursts of action. I share a cultural reference frame with Catch-22 that enriches the experience. Yosarian, the protagonist, is a man who looks at the world around him and wonders if he is the only sane person in an insane world. Hungry Joe can only get a peaceful night’s sleep while working mission lest being driven mad by idleness. Clevenger is a motivated idealist who thinks that anything less than complete devotion to God, Country, and Duty is insane. Colonel Cathcart is a leader that cares more about his reputation for leading “the toughest” than he does about the well-being of his people. Stories of centuries ago would flit around us as her voice gave life to Orpheus, the musician, Prometheus, the maker of man, and Pan, the god of nature. We use these building blocks of math and numbers all of the time and yet we do not truly stop to think about what they are or why they work the way they do. I was one of those very people and I would be lying if I said that I fully appreciate math for what it is. Only through my own curiosity and self-motivated research have I learned to appreciate more than I had before. Surreal Numbers by Knuth helped me put what numbers are into more perspective. It is a rather slim book, yet because of its density it takes awhile to read in order to understand what it says. The prompt for this essay was “Discuss a book that has particular significance for you. What effect does it have on what you think or how you think? ” Every bit of art, knowledge, thought, and opinion has value and can change a person. If you really care about ideas, explaining why one is important is almost impossible because every idea intersects with and plays off of other ideas. For every book I read I find myself adding at least three more to my reading list, whether they inspired the author or were inspired by him. Being overtly anti-war could cause you and your message to be immediately dismissed by those that view an anti-war stance as anti-troop or anti-patriotic. The poor pay the price while the rich reap the benefit. By using satire to infiltrate the minds that would not be receptive to direct anti-war messages, we allow the anti-war messages to form in the readers’ own heads. We allow people to see past what the media and authority figures have trained them to believe and instead think for themselves in their own self-interest.