So there you have everything you need to know. It’s not the best application essay, but perhaps is among the more honest. I really hope it is useful to you for some purpose or other. I’m sorry I couldn’t use softer paper.
No hard feelings,
Alexa Yang
Yeah, you guessed it. The dumb bastards let me in. I was fated to succeed in school even when I tried my best to fail.
Once on campus, I made it through freshmen orientation, but just barely. I snickered through all their attempts to classify me: male/female, gay/straight, cis-/transgendered, white/minority/Asian. I suffered through all the indoctrination regarding sexual harassment, whose message for college boys was: have sex, and you risk being expelled. Now you better go have sex, because withholding it is also sexual harassment. When my dorm counselor told me to “check my privilege”, it damn near triggered a macro-aggression.
Fortunately my roommate was a very sweet and smart Indian girl who was also very religious. When she found out I was Christian she put away the elephant-god statue lest I take offense. I thought it improved our decor, but I didn’t want to embarrass her by calling attention to her tactfulness. Once classes started I threw myself into them and ignored all the advantages of being at an Ivy League school in the greatest city on earth. I spent my life between my dorm room, classes, the library and the cafeteria. Maybe Rutgers would have been cheaper, but I had to admit I was happy as a clam.
I was all but invisible on campus. The only feature distinguishing me from the hordes of Asian girls was my height. I’m no Amazon like my sister, but five foot eight is still well above average. My classmates may have been of different colors and nationalities, but under the skin they were all upper middle class and largely interchangeable.
I’ll give you one example. In Art Humanities the instructor was unfortunately a real jerk of a grad student. He probably has heard of Meyer Schapiro. That’s as far as I can go to mention the two in the same breath. He put up a slide of Delacroix’s Abduction of Rebecca and asked how we know it was painted from the imagination, a Walter Scott novel rather than real life. There were no takers, so he supplied the answer: “There is no such horse.”
That roused a girl sitting behind me. “What do you mean, there is no such horse?”
“There’s no such thing in real life as a dappled grey horse with a golden mane and tail.”
“Of course there is. It’s called a Welsh pony.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes I’m sure. I own one.”
The equestrienne in this instance ought to have been a Greenwich debutante straight out of a William Hamilton cartoon. Instead she was from somewhere in Latin America and spoke with a noticeable accent. Columbia College was matchless in the diversity of its snobs.
One break from my routine was chemistry lab. My parents drilled into me that the only science courses worth taking were the ones science majors took—none of this “Physics for Poets” nonsense. I got matched up with a lab partner named Joseph Churchill. The class was pretty big, so the simplest way to contact him was via email. We arranged to meet in my floor lounge to go over the first lab.