exceptional experience essay

Stumped by the University of Colorado Supp? Me, too! I’ve had quite a few students this “season” who were flummoxed by the supplement for the University of Colorado. It kind of threw me a bit as well. But behind all that blah, blah, blah, I believe it was just another way of asking: Why Our College? or more specifically, Why YOU At Our College? This is a common theme of many of the supplemental college application essays. And even though most students are pretty fried after writing their core essays, they shouldn’t overlook these supps and just give back a bunch of blah, blah, blah. It can be challenging, but it’s worth the time to find some tangible, specific and personal details to give your answer meaning and interest. I’ve bolded some key words in the official prompt to get you thinking of ways to respond: * * * * * Essay B (required, 250 to 500 words). “The University of Colorado Boulder’s Flagship 2030 strategic plan promotes exceptional teaching, research, scholarship, creative works, and service distinguishing us as a premier university. We strive to foster a diverse and inclusive community for all that engages each member in opportunities for academic excellence, leadership, and a deeper understanding of the world in which we live. Given the statement above, how do you think you could enrich our diverse and inclusive community, and what are your hopes for your college experience?” * * * * * It’s the first part of that question that seemed to confound us the most: “How do you think you could enrich our diverse and inclusive community?” First, don’t get tripped up on the awkward wording of this question. Replace the word “enrich” with “contribute to.” Basically, they want to know how and what you will contribute to their college (which just happens to pride itself on being diverse and inclusive.) The main thing you are contributing is YOU! If you are unique.
The question remains, still, how does a human being lend meaning to experiences that touch him or her very deeply but yet are not encapsulated in an experientially standardized pattern (considering the attributes of time, circumstances, structure, duration, frequency, social context, as much as its consequences in personal and social terms)? Or, how does the individual objectify a subjectively experienced disequilibrium that might also threaten his or her perception of the social or moral order as much as that of his or her own position and roles in society? I intend to explore precisely those occasions that have an arbitrary beginning and ending out of the stream of chronological temporality. Although these events usually lack any relationship to major passages in our life cycle, they leave strong marks on the map of our life experiences. In spite of their apparent riviality and the impromptu nature of the circumstances that initiated them,they remain stuck in our memory as symbolic insignia of our individual destiny. Some of these extraordinary encounters we often enthusiastically narrate to our relatives, friends, and casual acquaintances. But others remain as part of our untold or even secretive repertoire of life experiences that we preserve as a private domain of our social personality. They enter the shaft that stores millions of the stories that generations of humans have taken to their graves against all temptation of vanity, self pity, and other stimuli for public attention. [.]  I cannot suggest a satisfactory classification of these events since I have not studied other individuals. I report on those apparently unimportant and disjointed events that remain tucked away in my memory, a method also employed by Dilthey and expressed in his eloquent words: Elements in my awareness of the experience draw me on to elements of others which, in the course of my.
SPEAKING WITH A STUDENT recently, I was dismayed when she claimed that hers was not an “exceptional” story. There was no death, no loss, and so she thought her story of little value. I disagreed. In fact hers is a tale of great gain, though of the spiritual type, and it got me thinking about the difference purely in terms of craft and how to record the various forms of memoir I like to read. Writing about an exceptional experience provides lessons for us all, no matter what our tales include, and to tackle this I have turned to an exceptional author, writer and teacher, John W. Evans. His beautiful new book, Young Widower: A Memoir, is splendid with the thoughtful skill of someone who can teach you what you need to know to write about the big stuff – the exceptional experiences—of life, while also upping your game on the small details of how to write good memoir. Read on. Writing the Exceptional Experience in Memoir by John W. Evans Witness of the exceptional experience is one of the reasons we read memoir—that happened where and how to who? —and it presents two challenges to humble even the best writers. How do we make the exceptional experience vivid to a reader who has not lived it? And, when we succeed in doing so, how do we preserve that sense of exception, so that the experience does not become, in its accessibility, general and banal? Most writers are familiar with the idea of a “clock”: a set period of time in a scene, chapter, or full memoir that can be identified with some outside event. A clock gives structure to exterior time by letting the reader keep track of it while events occur. For example, your clock for a chapter might be that hitchhiking trip you took with a friend from Seattle to Tuscaloosa. When the narrator reaches Kansas City we know we’re 3/4ths of the way through the chapter. Or, your memoir might unfold (as mine does) during an entire year.