What it is: That essay idea you got when your counselor suggested your essay should be “creative” and “original” but what you heard was “off-the-wall” and “irreverent.”
Sample (not submitted by actual applicant): Nestled amongst its brethren, wrapped in cellophane, it sits—the height of gene splicing as it relates to eating utensils. The spork is indigenous to Taco Bell, a restaurant known as much for its creative take on meal schedules as it is its inauthentic Mexican meals. Nevertheless, the spork has made its home here where the lettuce, meat, and cheese drippings require the unique stylings of a spoon-fork. Or is it a fork-spoon?
In many ways, I think of myself as a spork: multi-talented, unique, and (truthfully) a little odd. I don’t fit neatly into the basic stereotype of the dumb jock, “poking holes” in the opposing teams’ defense, nor do think of myself as a nerd—relentlessly “scooping” every scrap of knowledge from the bottom of the bowl. I guess you could say I’m an athlete-student. Or is it a student-athlete?
Why you wrote it: Of all the items in your application, writing a solid essay is practically tantamount to filling out the application in the first place. It’s your opportunity to showcase how you’re genuinely unique and more than a series of academic and extracurricular statistics. So, going a little out there by comparing yourself to something you figure no one else has thought to compare themselves to sounds like just the ticket.
Why admission counselors hate to read it: Actually, we don’t hate to read these essays. Some of the best essays we read employ this formula to great effect, especially when matched with the right voice. But we hate when they’re done poorly, and many of them are. In an effort to be idiosyncratic, you come off as contrived. The key problem with these essays is that the metaphor is either too predictable or too ambiguous to really serve the purpose of clearly differentiating you from the rest of the applicant pool.
Solution: Test-drive your essay on a number of people. If they look like they’re about to cringe, go back to the word processor. Also, Google your essay topic. Typing in “spork college essay” yields 21,400 results. One of which is a Yahoo! Answers post in which a student asks how to begin a personal essay and is recommended to be creative. The reply goes on to read: “Like in my essay, I compared myself to a spork. I am a spork. I said that like sporks have three prongs, I have three qualities that make me who I am. And I did it so that those three qualities also described a spork. The one I remember best is unique.”
Ugh. Case in point.
The best examples of these essays, as mentioned earlier, are the ones in which the writer has a very clearly defined voice or a compositional style that compliments the creativity of the metaphor itself. (They also choose the right metaphor to begin with.) It’s not an easy task and really should only be undertaken by the best writers who are confident in their wit and prose. Ask an English teacher if he or she thinks you can effectively make your metaphor work…and don’t be upset if the answer is: “Well…”
