Episode 25: The College Essay I Didn’t Write (12/31/2020)

Hey y’all. Welcome to Fast Facts for Gen Z. I’m your host, Callie, and I don’t know anything about anything. Come with me on my exploration of the world, and I’ll tell you everything you ever, and never, wanted to know, through the eyes of Gen Z.

Today’s episode: writing my college essays and my family’s obsession with hot sauce.

The dreaded college essay was something I was supposed to be planning for. When major events happened to me as a kid, my mom would say, “write it down! You can use it in your college essays one day.” In high school, when I would have major conflicts with friends or, more often, teachers and administration, my mom would say, “write this down! You can use it in your college essays.” I was supposed to be overcoming obstacles, observing major character growth, and having meaningful thoughts about the future. In reality, I wasn’t really doing any of that. Not for lack of trying, but when you’re a kid and a teenager, it’s really hard to look at any of your actions and experiences from an outside gaze. So, despite years of advice, when I sat down to write my college essays, I didn’t know where to start. Then, I started. I asked myself a lot of useless questions, like “what is interesting about me?” and “what sets me apart from a crowd?” Those questions slowly evolved into more useful questions, like “what major events have fundamentally changed me as a person?” and “what do the admissions counselors want to hear that I could realistically write about without too much embellishment?” I’m not saying that it’s more useful to lie on your college essay than to write about being unique, I would never advise that. I’m just saying that any good writer and speaker knows and caters to the expectations and beliefs of their audience, regardless of whether they believe what they’re saying. Which is exactly why this is a college essay that I didn’t write.

This story answers the question, “what is interesting about me?” Not particularly well, of course, but it answers it. This is the hot sauce parable, complete with the embellishment that it’s an actual parable and not just a story. It, like all family stories, begins with my mother.

One of the many facets of my mom’s personality is that she loves hot sauce. Not in the white person way either – she’ll go full blast at every meal. No Tabasco or Frank’s RedHot for her – for many years, it was El Yucateco all day, every day. This was normal. It was just her. Just a fun little quirk, and we could giggle if she put too much on. And then, everything changed.

In 2015, production company First We Feast began a YouTube web series titled “Hot Ones,” hosted by Sean Evans and with guest appearances by a new celebrity each week. Sean gives them a standard interview while the two of them eat progressively hotter chicken wings until they either reach the end or the celebrity gives up. Sean never gives up, this is his life. We’re not worried about Sean at all. Anyway, I don’t remember exactly when my family started watching it, but it quickly became a fan favorite. Notably, it was my dad who really loved the show. Thus began the steady increase in the number of hot sauces in the house. My dad bought the three Hot Ones original hot sauces, which are 1, 5, and 10 on the heat scale. Call me a baby, but I do not like hot sauce. It’s not that I can’t handle the spice, I think, it’s that I really don’t enjoy it. Spice is fine, but it’s not like… fun. So I have no idea how hot these sauces actually are, but let’s assume that the hottest one, The Last Dab, is hotter than anything you’ve ever tasted in your entire life ever. So I’ve heard.

After that, the collection grew. My uncle, who lives in California with my aunt and cousins, challenged my dad to a hot sauce competition, where they mailed hot sauces to each other and made videos trying them and trash-talking each other. Healthy masculinity, since both of them were obviously joking about the trash-talk and also close to tears from the heat. Their competition increased the number of hot sauces in the house, most of which were deathly hot because the intent behind them was malice. Thanks, Dave. Lucky for us, my mom was unaffected by this so-called “hot” sauce and continued to put it on nearly every meal she had. Soon, they were used up, and I thought we were free. Oh, how wrong I was. Instead of going away, the malicious sauces created an addiction. Fast-forward to now, and… we have ten different hot sauces in the house, nine if you don’t count Frank’s RedHot, which we do have even if no one eats it.

I want to remind you that I, personally, do not eat hot sauce. So, drowning in a sea of peppers and tears, what have I learned from my abstinence?

Well, this is why I didn’t write this college essay. I’ve learned…nothing? Basically nothing. Maybe I could have spun the story in a way that let me say I learned to be interested in things the people I love are interested in, not because I share the interest, but because I love them. True, but sappy, and I didn’t need hot sauce to prove that to me. This is why the question “what makes me interesting?” is not a super useful question unless you’re a brilliant inventor and had three patents by the age of thirteen, or something like that. Colleges want to see self-reflection, passion for something, and the ability to learn and grow. I assumed. I drafted out this essay thinking that my purpose was to stand out to my college and show them that I was bold and funny and multi-faceted, with experiences not limited to my academic portfolio. As it turned out, that wasn’t my purpose at all. Truthfully, I’m still unhappy with the essay I did write.

In my English class, we wrote our college essays as an assignment. This was both to make sure we got them done, and so we could ask questions and get advice and feedback from our teacher on what was touted as the most important essay of our lives to date. We didn’t have to submit the essay we wrote in class to colleges, but I decided hey, to hell with it, I’m not putting tons of effort and thought into this essay for class and then doing the same thing for a completely different one.

I was told that the purpose of the essay was to show reflective thought and plan for the future. Perhaps it was. As a person who journals, and who hosts a fairly reflective podcast, you’d think that a reflective essay about something major in my life would be easy to write about, but for whatever reason, I felt very stuck.

I was very indecisive about my topic. Any event I came up with didn’t feel big enough. A family member’s death? Major, but cliche. “No admissions counselor wants to read about that,” I thought, “not even if you had some sort of epiphany from it.” The community service I’ve been doing since I was nine? Definitely good enough, but I wanted to use it for my supplemental essay to my dream school. Writing a common essay is to write to the audience of each college, and the particular community service I had been doing suited my dream school much much more than the other schools I applied to. So, that was out. I could write about the summer camp that fundamentally changed me as a person in every way and was my dream job until I became so disillusioned with the justice system that I feel the need to understand everything about it so I can dismantle each and every broken piece until the broken system falls. I want to be a lawyer. I could have just said that. Anyway. Camp was a great idea, but six months into quarantine, over a year since my last day at camp, my memories were foggy and obscured by longing for it and how good my mental health always was during it. Camp was when I always felt the most capable and supported, and both of those feelings are hard to come by in the days of quarantine and online school. No matter what I wrote about camp, it turned sour. So that was out. Theater, my other passion, was similar. My experience with school theater had taken a turn for the worse in my junior year, but it was half out of pettiness and spite that I quit, which is not exactly the message you want to send to a college.

Unfortunately, I had run completely out of ideas. Six months into quarantine, it was almost as if I couldn’t remember anything I had ever done. If only I had written things down when my mom told me to…

And so began the task of spinning the frustration and exhaustion I felt about theater and the story of quitting into something inspiring and about personal growth. Seems like an impossible feat, and it was, which is why I’m still unhappy with the result. I spun an old story of overworking myself into a story about learning the importance of setting boundaries and saying no, and breaking the dogma against quitting when you really need to quit something toxic. I’m not sure if I’m unhappy with it because of perfectionism, or if I’m unhappy with it because it’s bad.

I feel like I should mention that I got into my dream school with a good enough financial aid package that I’m going there no matter what. I am almost one hundred percent sure that my essay had nothing to do with it, and that it was my supplemental essay, community service, and academic portfolio that got me in. So, not the end of the world that I don’t like my common essay, but not my favorite thing either.

If you’re stressing about your essay, I don’t have especially helpful advice for you. If I can tell you anything, it’s to figure out your audience, and write for them. That’s helpful all the time. In my mind, the audience for this podcast is still me, which is why I’m not growing. Which is fine, that is not and was never the goal. I’m glad all of you are here, though. My analytics say I have a very diverse audience by age and gender, which is wonderful to see but also makes making content for a specific audience nearly impossible because all of you would really really enjoy very very different things. Which is why, at least for now, you can trust that I’m enjoying every podcast I make, because I’m doing it all for me. And that’s all I really need.

Thank you for listening to Fast Facts for Gen Z. Your support has meant the world to me this year. Can you believe it’s been six months since this podcast started? I can’t. Y’all are awesome. If you’ve listened to every one, that’s over 6 hours of me talking. Absolutely wild to me. Thank you. I’ll see you in the new year. This is Callie, signing off.