More often than not, you will impress no one while you hijack the personal essay to a place you have never been. This year, a young woman concluded an essay about he embarrassment over her parents' Old World values and foreign accents, her desire for the approval of her peers and a tear-filled confrontation with her father by invoking Ralph Waldo Emerson. Academics tend to see through a glass darkly. They value ambiguity, uncertainty and irony. But above all, writers should establish distance from their subjects, including themselves.
Distance discourages essayists from drawing the clich d moral.
Every semester I yearn for the applicant who will declare that organized sports are not a metaphor for life, that coaches are often wrong or a little crazy, that the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. It's O.K. to be just a bit confused, to find the meaning of life elusive. Selection committee members are pretty savvy. They have learned to look for authenticity, not profundity. But knowing yourself, on paper, takes imagination reflection and time.