The Student News Site of Rock Bridge High School

Bearing News

The Student News Site of Rock Bridge High School

Bearing News

The Student News Site of Rock Bridge High School

Bearing News

    College Essay Example

    Stephen Turban, a former Rock Bridge student, used this essay for his Common Application. Turban now attends Harvard University.
    Entering my kindergarten classroom, I shuffled around my blueberry shaped classmates as some began throwing their winter layers into cubbies. Admittedly, my torso was equally bulbous – covered with the threats and extortions of my mother: a heavy jacket, gloves, and a hat. But, below the waist I wore only a pair of frigid khaki shorts. As I walked proudly to my seat, my teacher quickly approached me. Bug-eyed, in what I assumed was intense admiration, she asked “Stephen, aren’t you the tiniest bit cold?”.
    “No,” I replied, smiling. “I don’t get cold.”
    For as long as I can remember, those words were my battle cry. Everyday, I endured questions from playground supervisors, taunts from my classmates, and concerned looks from parents. But, everyday I stood my ground, refusing pants on principle. I would never wear pants. I would never conform. I would never ever be cold.
    Ten years later, on a non-descript winter morning, I woke up shivering. Moving mechanically to my khaki drawer, I felt my legs cringe at the prospect of another “pantsless” walk to school. My boundless heat had left with elementary school, but my identity hadn’t. I was fifteen now, often miserable, but unable to do what felt like a betrayal of the past nine years of my life. Pausing to open my khaki drawer, I noticed a pair of jeans neatly folded on top. Looking out my frost lined windows, I clenched my jaw and decided. Gingerly, as if afraid of some microbial contagion, I picked up the jeans.
    Putting on pants was not a moment of gleaming insight, but the beginning of an understanding. I realize now that every day I’d stubbornly worn shorts under the banner of “being myself,” I had not been preserving who I was, but who I had once been. By spurning pants, I had chained myself to who my past wanted me to be: a slave to the errant belief that by changing who we are, we betray who we once were.
    When I slipped on the jeans, I ended one lifelong tradition and began another: acceptance of the concept that who I am is not a static goal but a moving target. Who we are is not ever to be achieved but always to be chased.
    I was always taught to be myself, and as a pantsless blueberry, I took this to mean that I could not let others define me. But, now, as a larger, better-clothed blueberry, I realize the preconceptions we hold of ourselves, the traditions we create, and the dogma we overlook, cage us more effectively than any regime. Though I was unaware at the time, putting on those pants changed my life. I put aside years of tradition in beginning the struggle to question my own assumptions, look at myself critically, and live the changes that I find. For, when it comes to deciding “who I am,” it is not my friends, family, nor even my past self, but I who wears the pants.
    Essay by: Stephen Turban

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