Please tell us something about yourself, your experiences, or activities that you believe would reflect positively on your ability to succeed at Penn State. This is your opportunity to tell us something about yourself that is not already reflected in your application or academic records. We suggest a limit of 500 words or fewer.
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I’ve done this application grind before, back when it was singly, the most important thing in my life and, ironically, as it so often is, before I knew why it was so. (Important)
There’s a dull hum in the back of my mind as I click through these pages, the familiar array of emotions swirling around my stomach and settling in the back of my throat. Sometimes I think back and wonder what I might have possibly done differently to ‘succeed’ the first time around, but there isn’t any one thing really. I am who I am, I think what I think, and I know what I know because of everything that’s happened and brought me here to this point today. I didn’t know anything then. So I just did what I was supposed to do. But when you are merely going through the motions, it’s easy to become just another cog in the machine and sometimes breaking free will also mean falling through the cracks and ‘through-the-cracks’ is just another place where it's even easier to be lost.
I view my last foray into higher education as something like that. Without an accurate understanding of what going to university could mean for me and without a higher purpose to tough it out for, I fell through the cracks.
I managed to stay afloat for 3 years but despite being so close to the end, I ultimately withdrew, because I knew there were a lot of things I needed to figure out before I continue. For a long time, I spent every night going to bed, hoping to the Powers-That-Be, that perhaps tonight would be the night I wouldn’t wake up. It was a dark and heavy time. I made a lot of mistakes. I wanted to die.
It’s hard to pinpoint the moment I started to feel differently. I’m sure the ascent was gradual, a step forward here, a step further there, but it still almost feels like somewhere, a switch flipped, and one morning, I woke up and I realized I didn’t want that anymore. I didn’t want to die...I wanted to live.
There’s a line in Augusten Burroughs’, “Magical Thinking: True Stories,” that comes to mind when I think about where I went and now, where I’m going. He says, “I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions.” I feel like this, more than anything else, is what I learned from my first stint in college.
This insight, coupled with a deep, renewed desire to think and breathe and live and learn, are together the two most important things I have now that were missing before. I didn’t know then, but I know it now. And now that I do, I am ready. I am confident I have what I need to succeed at Penn State and that the knowledge and skills I learn here will in turn help me in propelling my good intentions into great action.