HELP PLEASE, application essay
BA/BFA Essay Question 1
Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your educational background and how they have prepared you for study within the BA/BFA Combined Degree Program.
I have always been a wiseass, an intellectual, in nature. While I was once an inimitably perfect student, puberty and related factors have since rendered me a bit more of a wild card depending of course on the factors with which one chooses to evaluate academic performance. My devotion to learning, writing, theory have only grown, amplified, refined themselves through the years but so too has my undaunted idealism withered and died, my capacity for alienation growing and molting about me like a second skin. Not too long ago a former academic advisor, a fool and accidental sage, coldly informed me that “it’s not your academic abilities that are in question but your willingness to conform”. And I am still suffering and reverberating from that bitter bit of truth. My seriousness is stubborn and possibly self-destructive and I really wish it spoke for itself; it certainly seems to recoil when asked to be proven. Research and writing are at once heavenly and torturous, associative and disassociative perfectionist rites, monologues posing as dialogues with the world. I retain the primary habits of a nerd but under the cover of newer affects: the disdain of a self-hating, depressive, punker, feminist, queer for those who do not suffocate without the aforementioned engagements.
I can recall being affectionately referred to as “little old man” by my mother prior to six years old (I often offer this as a partial justification for my preferred name - Mika - supposed to etymologically connote “wise little raccoon” among various Native American tribes). Also somewhere before six I can spottily remember being dressed up in my nice denim jumper, perhaps even sporting a scarf as well for added color, and riding on the bus with my mom to meet a nice lady who asked me lots of questions, little riddles, to perform small tasks - none of which I minded at all. In retrospect, I would deduce that this was an IQ test and I saw I had scored well, above average. This placed me into an “alpha” program for gifted kiddies at an elementary school a good hour ride away on the circuitous schoolbus route I would take daily. If more than a bit too shy, I was also sensitive, polite, cooperative, and always knew the answers - a shoe-in for teacher’s pet in an environment where that wasn’t a point of ridicule or venom. In keeping with the archetype, I loved to read and devoured books both from the juvenile section - where the librarian knew my name, recommended books - as well as selections from among the classics. The closest library was not even always enough and the lure of the exotic and unknown, a fresh slew of shelves upon shelves of books, would not infrequently draw me up the long, steep hill, hand in hand with my dad to visit a farther local library; often we’d be stuck re-evaluating our initial selections before getting on line just to keep under the 25 item check-out limit between the two of us.
My mom regularly cooked fish dinners - brain food! - the night before yearly citywide tests and egg breakfasts the morning of; my sister and I regularly scored in the 99.9th percentile without breaking a sweat and I don’t know that it was primarily the extra protein that did the trick. With these scores, both my sister and I qualified to take the entrance test for Hunter College High School in our late sixth grade years. My sister, four years older, had attended our zoned elementary school and then the neighborhood junior high, both within walking distance; being no snoozer, she then went to Stuyvesant High School and eventually got her degree in chemical engineering from the Cooper Union. With my parents’ input, she had declined to take the entrance test to Hunter High. Hunter High was a strange hybrid creature, a joint junior high and secondary school (grades 7-12) for gifted students that only admitted qualified, soon-to-be graduating sixth-graders; no other transfers at later grade levels; not bound to the Board of Ed per se and thus free to craft a specialized curriculum, it was still a public school in the sense that it remained tuition-free. Importantly, it also stood on 94th Street in Manhattan while I lived in Flushing, Queens, a neighborhood soon to be redefined both ideologically and conversationally as the last stop on the #7 subway line. Unlike my sister, I got the go-ahead from my parents to take the entrance test for Hunter High ($50, verbal and math sections plus an essay) because, for some reason, while they balked imagining my sister navigating the subway system at the tender age of twelve, they were undaunted at the prospect of twelve-year-old me making this daily commute. Probably there was an element of just loosening up parentally with the second child in this decision but I also have no doubt that I commanded (demanded) such trust to a good degree; they saw in me a strange, independent streak writ large. I threw up the night before the Hunter exam with all the anxiety; I also got in.
I graduated from sixth grade as valedictorian; I prepared a speech that I can’t remember a bit of though I have no doubt that it was turgid and grandiose in the special, inexperienced way precocious twelve-year-old prose tends to be. (My prose today is turgid in a slight but significantly different way.) The morning of my graduation ceremony I was getting dressed in appropriate assembly-wear - a white blouse, black skirt, tights, dark shoes - when my mother entered my room and began choking me. In retrospect, she was never too good with public gatherings and schmoozings. Supposedly, I had been putting on the wrong shirt from among my number of white blouses. I was distraught and crying as we gathered in our classroom and began to file down to the auditorium. I was trying to pull myself together for the ceremony; I wasn’t telling anyone what was wrong. I knew that both my parents would be in the audience. At the appropriate time, I got up to make my speech. I believe I said a few words before the microphone gave off feedback; I sat back down and gave up on the rest of the speech. Standing up front, facing the audience, I saw that indeed both my parents were out there. I marched up onto the stage, accepted a rolled paper, shook hands with the principal. In the gymnasium where kids mingled back with their parents, my mother hissed something at me while my dad chided her to leave me alone. I slept over at a friend’s house that night as pre-arranged. It was an end of an era.
Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your educational background and how they have prepared you for study within the BA/BFA Combined Degree Program.
I have always been a wiseass, an intellectual, in nature. While I was once an inimitably perfect student, puberty and related factors have since rendered me a bit more of a wild card depending of course on the factors with which one chooses to evaluate academic performance. My devotion to learning, writing, theory have only grown, amplified, refined themselves through the years but so too has my undaunted idealism withered and died, my capacity for alienation growing and molting about me like a second skin. Not too long ago a former academic advisor, a fool and accidental sage, coldly informed me that “it’s not your academic abilities that are in question but your willingness to conform”. And I am still suffering and reverberating from that bitter bit of truth. My seriousness is stubborn and possibly self-destructive and I really wish it spoke for itself; it certainly seems to recoil when asked to be proven. Research and writing are at once heavenly and torturous, associative and disassociative perfectionist rites, monologues posing as dialogues with the world. I retain the primary habits of a nerd but under the cover of newer affects: the disdain of a self-hating, depressive, punker, feminist, queer for those who do not suffocate without the aforementioned engagements.
I can recall being affectionately referred to as “little old man” by my mother prior to six years old (I often offer this as a partial justification for my preferred name - Mika - supposed to etymologically connote “wise little raccoon” among various Native American tribes). Also somewhere before six I can spottily remember being dressed up in my nice denim jumper, perhaps even sporting a scarf as well for added color, and riding on the bus with my mom to meet a nice lady who asked me lots of questions, little riddles, to perform small tasks - none of which I minded at all. In retrospect, I would deduce that this was an IQ test and I saw I had scored well, above average. This placed me into an “alpha” program for gifted kiddies at an elementary school a good hour ride away on the circuitous schoolbus route I would take daily. If more than a bit too shy, I was also sensitive, polite, cooperative, and always knew the answers - a shoe-in for teacher’s pet in an environment where that wasn’t a point of ridicule or venom. In keeping with the archetype, I loved to read and devoured books both from the juvenile section - where the librarian knew my name, recommended books - as well as selections from among the classics. The closest library was not even always enough and the lure of the exotic and unknown, a fresh slew of shelves upon shelves of books, would not infrequently draw me up the long, steep hill, hand in hand with my dad to visit a farther local library; often we’d be stuck re-evaluating our initial selections before getting on line just to keep under the 25 item check-out limit between the two of us.
My mom regularly cooked fish dinners - brain food! - the night before yearly citywide tests and egg breakfasts the morning of; my sister and I regularly scored in the 99.9th percentile without breaking a sweat and I don’t know that it was primarily the extra protein that did the trick. With these scores, both my sister and I qualified to take the entrance test for Hunter College High School in our late sixth grade years. My sister, four years older, had attended our zoned elementary school and then the neighborhood junior high, both within walking distance; being no snoozer, she then went to Stuyvesant High School and eventually got her degree in chemical engineering from the Cooper Union. With my parents’ input, she had declined to take the entrance test to Hunter High. Hunter High was a strange hybrid creature, a joint junior high and secondary school (grades 7-12) for gifted students that only admitted qualified, soon-to-be graduating sixth-graders; no other transfers at later grade levels; not bound to the Board of Ed per se and thus free to craft a specialized curriculum, it was still a public school in the sense that it remained tuition-free. Importantly, it also stood on 94th Street in Manhattan while I lived in Flushing, Queens, a neighborhood soon to be redefined both ideologically and conversationally as the last stop on the #7 subway line. Unlike my sister, I got the go-ahead from my parents to take the entrance test for Hunter High ($50, verbal and math sections plus an essay) because, for some reason, while they balked imagining my sister navigating the subway system at the tender age of twelve, they were undaunted at the prospect of twelve-year-old me making this daily commute. Probably there was an element of just loosening up parentally with the second child in this decision but I also have no doubt that I commanded (demanded) such trust to a good degree; they saw in me a strange, independent streak writ large. I threw up the night before the Hunter exam with all the anxiety; I also got in.
I graduated from sixth grade as valedictorian; I prepared a speech that I can’t remember a bit of though I have no doubt that it was turgid and grandiose in the special, inexperienced way precocious twelve-year-old prose tends to be. (My prose today is turgid in a slight but significantly different way.) The morning of my graduation ceremony I was getting dressed in appropriate assembly-wear - a white blouse, black skirt, tights, dark shoes - when my mother entered my room and began choking me. In retrospect, she was never too good with public gatherings and schmoozings. Supposedly, I had been putting on the wrong shirt from among my number of white blouses. I was distraught and crying as we gathered in our classroom and began to file down to the auditorium. I was trying to pull myself together for the ceremony; I wasn’t telling anyone what was wrong. I knew that both my parents would be in the audience. At the appropriate time, I got up to make my speech. I believe I said a few words before the microphone gave off feedback; I sat back down and gave up on the rest of the speech. Standing up front, facing the audience, I saw that indeed both my parents were out there. I marched up onto the stage, accepted a rolled paper, shook hands with the principal. In the gymnasium where kids mingled back with their parents, my mother hissed something at me while my dad chided her to leave me alone. I slept over at a friend’s house that night as pre-arranged. It was an end of an era.