Please Help Me with my ESSAY! (MIT)

CC_Admin
Tue, 26 Oct 2004 02:33:47 +0000

This essay is for MIT question 1A. Describe a difficult situation in your life and how you reacted/responded. Any suggestions on improvement would be greatly appreciated.

Also, I would like suggestions on how to shorten my essay. Right now, it is 670 words, and I want to shorten it to 580 (the limit is 500, I know).

Thanks for the responses. Anyway, here it is, the origin of piman (and my essay):

__________Tight corner ahead. I lean left and apply the brakes just enough to make the turn. My friends, beside me, pedal furiously in an attempt to reach the bottom first. I know I can beat them. I pedal harder, but suddenly, I find myself unable to move. I look down, expecting to see my bike, but instead, I find a green stretcher. My head is caked in blood; my legs are covered in cuts and bruises. “You’re really lucky to be alive.” The words of the paramedic to my right.

__________What happened? Did I crash? An hour later, I got my answer. I had received a severe concussion, which explained the sudden jump in my memory. Apparently, my friends and I had decided to go rock climbing later that day. During the climb I slipped, leaving me to fall fifteen feet and roll thirty more down the side of the mountain. Fortunately, my plunge was broken when my body smashed into a stump. I’ve always been lucky like that. Unfortunately, because of my concussion, a neurosurgeon said I would suffer memory loss for the next nine months.

__________Most of my peers thought I was pretty lucky to get off with nothing more than a few cuts and a “bumped head,” but as a junior only a week into the school year, I felt anything but fortunate. My amnesia was so bad that I couldn’t even remember going to school the first week. I had trouble remembering what class I was in, or who my teachers were. At home, I couldn’t even recall where the dinner plates were kept. But I was determined to regain control over my life. I wouldn’t blindly accept the surgeon’s prognosis; I would turn it into a challenge. I vowed to regain my memory not in nine months, but in a mere three.

___________Of course, how to achieve this was an entirely different matter. How does one recall one’s memory? A seemingly paradoxical question. So, like any self-respecting nerd in times of trouble, I turned to math. My solution: a hobby taken up by geeks since the beginning of time. I would memorize the digits of pi.

___________At first, the going was relentlessly slow. I spent hours attempting to remember a cluster of just ten digits. 3.141592…nothing. My mind was blank. I would try again. Still nothing. For the moment, it seemed as if the surgeon might be right.

___________But my own doubt made me try even harder. Every second of my free time was devoted to pi. I stayed up late into the night, slowly reiterating the numbers that appeared on my electronic organizer. But the sleep deprivation was worth it. Within a few weeks’ time, I noticed a slight improvement. I could now memorize ten digits in single sitting, not phenomenal by any means, but a sure sign of progress. Bolstered by my meager success, I persisted in my routine. Weeks flew by. By the end of the first month, I had reached the 100-digit mark. I could sense my memory slowly returning. In school, I was less hesitant to ask a question, fearful that it had already been answered. I actually remembered all of my teachers’ names. I went even further. 200 digits. 300. No longer did I have to mutter things to myself to remember them. More importantly, though, I no longer forgot where the dinner plates were kept. I was on top of the world, and just in time. The three months were up.

___________I continued my memorization of pi for several more months. However, like most good things, excess breeds tedium. Somehow, when one knows 600+ digits of a number, one tends to lose interest in pursuing the number further. Simply put, I became bored with pi after memorizing 631 digits. But I know that memorizing pi has had a significant influence on my life, one that reaches beyond the regurgitation of a sequence of numbers. If nothing else, it has taught me that with enough time and effort, even a simple number can heal a battered brain."