College Entrance Essay

Prompt: Tell about a creative project, performance or other work of yours and how it reflects your vision or voice.

I’ve been singing my whole life, but I never thought of myself as a performer.  I’ve been in numerous choirs with a good amount of people in them, and I’ve never really felt like I should stand out.  But when I sing by myself, I’m alone with no one around to criticize me, and that’s just the way I like it. I was always fearful that people wouldn’t accept me for what I enjoyed doing.  Though I knew people supported me and my singing, I didn’t want to believe them. I didn’t think I was enough.

Then, in my 8th grade year, our performing arts teacher assigned a project.  Inspire Joy required us to find something that inspires joy in our own lives and try to spread that joy to others.  Sounds cheesy, but in the end, I decided to sing for the twenty other people in the class. It certainly wasn’t a big audience, but I was still shaking with the thought of standing in front of everyone to just sing. I had never done anything like this before and I was scared I would mess up and sing the wrong notes, scared that they wouldn’t like the song I chose, scared they wouldn’t accept me.

Every class leading up to the performance, we were all practicing our acts so my peers wouldn’t have the time to notice what I was doing.  Nevertheless, every time I saw someone looking at me, I immediately assumed they were criticizing me, when they most likely didn’t care. There was nothing to worry about, but there I was, scared to the bone of rejection.

As I rehearsed and asked peers to critique me, I started to gain some confidence to the point where I thought that I could do it.  When the time came for me to sing, my hands were shaking as I gave the introduction, but I swallowed my nerves and started. Though I mixed up some of the lyrics, I still felt like I did something worthwhile at the end.  Even though I don’t think I sang well at all when looking back on it today, this experience helped me step out of that bubble and start on the path of improvement.

Writing Process

Reflection:

I actually thought of the topic for this piece really early on and I was hooked on this prompt right when I saw the list of ideas. However, writing this piece in an interesting way proved to be a challenge. Things still worked out in the end, but as I was going through the brainstorming and rough draft process, I really struggled to figure out what was required in this class. But now looking back on this, I’m actually really proud of what I put out.