Prompt: Boston College Supplement
Boston College’s founding in 1863 was in response to society’s call. That call came from an immigrant community in Boston seeking a Jesuit education to foster social mobility. Still today, the University empowers its students to use their education to address society’s greatest needs. Which of today’s local or global issues is of particular concern to you and how might you use your Boston College education to address it?(400 words)
Essay
One day after Sunday service, I was eating lunch with some teenagers and children from church. As I ate, a little 5-year-old girl played with my hair behind me. All of a sudden, I hear her sneeze; from the sound of it, she had just sneezed right into my hair.
“Did you just sneeze into my hair?” I asked.
“No, I lifted your hair out of the way,” she promptly answered.
I guess she sneezed into my back then. Perhaps, at the moment, I was not in the mood to appreciate her sweet, childish attempt to save my hair from her sneeze, but in retrospect, her little, innocent effort warms my heart. She really did try her best to protect my hair, even if the back of my shirt was sacrificed.
Though sometimes children may be annoying, disruptive, and troublesome, they’re full of that bright innocence that only childhood brings. Their simple joys and sorrows remind me of the importance of living without brooding on convoluted, elaborate reasonings. Childhood, even with all of its little bothers, is beautiful.
However, I notice that nowadays childhood is being diluted and polluted by modern technology. Oftentimes, young children would rather look at a screen than play with each other. While I was a counselor at the children’s bible camp, I saw around fifteen children all huddled around one girl’s apple watch, mesmerized by that glittery, one-by-one-inch screen. Many children have access to the whole internet, with all its memes and trends and curse words galore. Sometimes I see that they talk like influencers talk, act like influencers act. This affliction of modern technology reduces their attention spans, causes them to miss out on real-life interactions, and ultimately robs them of real childhood.
I would like to help bring back childhood, true childhood, childhood where kids learn by playing, not by watching screens. Where the internet is not the one who teaches children what the world is like, but rather, they can explore and apprehend it through real-life experiences. I would like to use my Boston College education to become a teacher who can show kids that some things just aren’t the same online. Living is one of them. After all, there’s no “life” in “online” (but there is in “offline”).
Tips for Writing
When you begin an essay, sometimes judging your own writing as you write can be paralyzing. Sometimes, all I would think about was how cringy my writing was instead of focusing on actually writing. You’ve just gotta get past yourself and put some words on the paper. Then again, sometimes you may get into a rut with your essay. Maybe you have a draft you’ve been working on for a while, and it just feels stuck, like you don’t know what to do with it. Personally, for around a week, I would get mad just by looking at my common app essay. When this happens, you just have to take a break. It doesn’t matter if the deadlines are coming up soon; when you’re stuck, you’re stuck, and forcing words out of yourself usually doesn’t work well. Take a break, work on something else, and then come back to it later.