How to Write Great Essays

HOW TO WRITE GREAT ESSAYS

---

HOW TO WRITE GREAT ESSAYS
CHAPTER 8
Sample Essay Prompts and Essays
104
104
UNTIMED PROMPT 5
Describe your future career plans. What experiences and influences have helped you to chose
this path?
I am haunted by the question that plagues many upcoming graduates . . . what
will I study in college? Many of my friends and family members assumed I
would study education and become a teacher. After all, throughout my life I
had always worked with children. Every summer from eighth grade through
high school, I worked as a camp counselor or a summer school teacher’s aide.
I embraced every chance I had to be with children, and they in turn responded
to my enthusiasm, energy, and the love of learning I shared with them. My
interest in working with young people came naturally—I remembered how fun
it was to be five years old, proud of what I could read aloud, enchanted by my
newfound abilities to create sentences and stories on paper, and so utterly ful-
filled by counting to 100.
Throughout high school, I have worked as a tutor at a Community Day
School. I worked with underserved first through third graders. I helped create
lesson plans and designed educational activities to boost students’ basic reading,
writing, mathematics, and creative problem-solving skills. My favorite part of
the week was “Mail Time.” I created a fictional character—an elf named Mijo
who lived in the room in which we met—to whom the children could write short,
secret notes. It was both an exercise of their newly acquired and budding writ-
ing skills, and also an outlet for problems they needed to get off their chest.
Through their notes, I also learned more about what they were going through.
Once a week, the children would get individual notes in return from Mijo, with
words of encouragement, little observances about their progress, or short anec-
dotes about rough times Mijo had in the past that mirrored the students’ own
experiences. Mijo even had his own signature notepaper and instead of signing
his name, he drew a picture of himself. It was fun to get to know the children
and to understand their worlds a little bit better; it’s amazing what children will
confide in an elf that they won’t tell adults! As I got to know the students bet-
ter, I was able to see what they needed to help them learn and grow.
When I was in elementary school, I always remember looking up to my
teachers, and wanting to be in their position. This summer I will be working as
a teacher’s aide in an after-school program. Since my class already has a rep-
utation for bad behavior, one of my goals is for the students to understand
more about their community—other teachers, each other, themselves, and me—
so that they become more aware of their own values and how their actions
affect the world around them. I also want my students to be exposed to a
variety of learning encounters so that they understand how their own complex
environments affect their experiences, and how these experiences, in turn,

---

105
affect their lives. Although I know the students will still have their difficult
moments, I hope they will become much more compassionate and learn to con-
sider how their words and actions affect their peers.
I have discovered that, for me, the challenge of eventually becoming a
teacher is also the lure: that as the world changes, new questions, issues, ideas,
and problems must be negotiated in the classroom. Students should have the
opportunity to interact with and react to what they are learning in a way that
is meaningful to them, and I want to be an active participant in this process.
However, I think that in order to help them be actively involved in their own
learning process, I need to formalize my knowledge and build a greater under-
standing of how kids learn, understand more about the relative strengths and
weaknesses of different educational systems, and learn about philosophies of
education in a program that addresses these issues. I want to know how stu-
dents learn, what motivates an individual to learn, and most importantly how I
can contribute to improving educational systems in my own community. I want
to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of our educational systems
so that I can foster and support a love of learning in young people and their
teachers. Additionally, I want to see the results of my work—I want to have
direct contact with the learners I am serving.