My application is in!

I've worked so hard on these entrance essays, and learned so much in the process that I want to blog them. They'll be slightly edited for confidential content, but largely intact. Without further ado, I present:

Essay one: Autobiographical statment discussing previous academic experience and the reasons for interuption in education:

I spent my home-schooled years in Canada and North Carolina hungry for college. The oldest of many children, (twelve at last count) I daydreamed about wide-open libraries, uninterrupted stretches of time just to read, and most of all, intellectual companions. My parents were rightfully consumed with the serious business of keeping us all fed, and my young siblings had no patience for my obsessions. I was sure that once I made it to college, the opportunities for discourse and discussion would be limitless.

At eighteen, my passions were split cleanly three ways. The first was science. I’d tasted the possibilities in local classes and teetered at the edge of pursuing a degree in computational chemistry. But left to my own devices with a dry textbook, I’d floundered in math and doubted my ability. Worse, a warning rang in my head: “A doctor? Why spend nearly a decade in school when you’ll be staying home with your children in the end?”
Directly opposite lay my desire to perform. In the last months before college, I’d won a place in a regional theatre camp: eight blissful weeks of eight-hour-a-day immersion in improvisation, choral singing, stage-fighting and prop-building. Joyfully, I imagined four more years of the same. I was accepted to UNC-Greensboro, intending to double-major in music and theatre.

Superseding even my love of science and theatre, my Catholic faith was the underlying principle of my life. Throughout my intensely religious childhood I had courted the possibility of a religious vocation. The seeming hugeness of this first life-decision (magnified in my mind by its potentially eternal consequences) haunted me, and I was racked with doubt over my choice. If this life was simply preparation for a heavenly career, it would be a terrible vanity to waste my time with art! Mere weeks before check-in at UNC-G, I performed a repentant about-face. A flurry of paperwork and phone-calls secured me a place in an extremely conservative Catholic college. It promised a rigorous liberal-arts education and daily religious formation: a chance to steep myself in both books and faith until God decided what to do with me.

My first year broke my resolve and my heart. It truly was a school for full immersion in a certain worldview. It was the worldview I’d assumed I’d always hold, but as the straight and narrow path closed in, I stumbled against the restrictions. I was scolded for reading Joyce (“a mere profane stylist”) and forbidden to produce a play by (“the scandalously homosexual”) Wilde. Turning to the library for comfort, I found that it lacked even Yeats (“a known occultist”). Disappointed and confused—in the throes of my first crisis of faith—I withdrew my heart and my mind from my studies. Ready to flee one disappointment for another, I left school behind.