Mixing Seawater: College Admission Essay Sample

When I was sixteen years old, I stayed for two weeks in the heart of the third arrondissement with a bronze-colored, balding man named Antoine and a white cat named Snodgrass. My mother was there too, of course, and it was technically a bed and breakfast, but the three-hundred year old loft felt a lot more like a home.

Actually, that isn’t very factual. It felt nothing like a home. The bathroom faucet was quite a confusing contraption, the toilet had two buttons, and the coffee made my eyes water.

I have good news, however: I got used to the coffee. Google is international, which helped me to discover that button one is a hasty flush, while button two is the full cleanse. Antoine, my mother, and I raised a champagne toast on seventeenth birthday with a brise making its way through the open window.

The thing about traveling to France (or anywhere, really) is that it teaches you more about what it means to be American - we are so rarely cognizant of our own culture that displacement is the one of few means by which we can realize the water we are treading in. Sometimes you forget how to swim. When this happens, remember: button one is a hasty flush; button two is the full cleanse.

I want to spend my undergrad years learning about the water I am treading in - and this means I would cherish the opportunity to study abroad. It means that I am both Atlantic and Pacific, but it is possible - and even probable - for me to steal drops of oceans wherever I go, Mediterranean and Caribbean and Adriatic, one by one, an assemblage of seawater strong enough to destroy the barriers that tell us that we are separate.

The University of Michigan prioritizes this travel, this amalgam of seawater, this breaking-of-barriers, and I think that it does so literally (like so many other schools) but also figuratively. I mean that I can study in Ecuador or Argentina, and that is fine and nice - but it means even more to me to go to a school that creates this mix-of-seawater on its own campus. I want to feel displaced less than 300 miles from home — and I think that’s possible when you are stretched, everyday, past the boundaries of what you have always known. What results, I think, is true knowledge. Eventually, the coffee stops making your eyes water. You grow to like it.

This, to me, is the power of a good education — the power of a University of Michigan Education. The truth is that I am split halfway between science and art; I love the taste of words and the precision of fact, and I want to immerse myself in a school where I can truly experience both. I want to spend four years mixing seawater, and I think that the University of Michigan is the best place for me to do that.