You heard me. My friends (Ren and Elizabeth) and I are hard at work on our college application essays—our creative college application essays.

Inspired by this New York Times piece on the increasingly whimsical and thought-provoking questions that elite colleges employ to stretch their prospective applicants’ imaginations, we (writers in our late 20s to early 30s) are challenging ourselves to take on some of the REAL essay questions being pondered by current high-school juniors and seniors.

We’ll be answering the same three questions and posting our essays here. Follow along—or better yet, join us.

Dec. 16: “If you could be raised by robots, dinosaurs, or aliens, which would you pick?” 

Dec. 18: “So where is Waldo, really?”

Dec. 20: “Write an essay somehow inspired by super-huge mustard.”

Here are the rules:

• We write as our current selves, not as 17-year-olds.
• Work in personal elements where possible (these are personal essays), but be as creative as you like.
• Upper word limit per essay is 750 words. No lower limit.

Logistics:

• We post our essays to our writer blogs by 5 PM Pacific on their respective due dates.
• Link each essay back to this challenge info.
• Once each person has posted her essay, share the direct link to that essay with the other challengers, so that we may link to essays on the same topic.

Before the fun officially starts, I have a confession to make: despite being a college graduate, I have never written a college admissions essay!  Why? The only university I applied to when I was a senior in high school simply didn’t require it as one of the application materials. I did also apply to the Honors College within the university, but their requirement of a generic “writing sample” allowed me to submit an excerpt of a retrospective short story I had been writing about a girl who drops out of a high school. It was written in the first person like a personal essay and I made sure to include a note that made it clear the piece was a work of fiction. To this day, I have not finished that story, but it wasn’t the only piece of fiction I wrote back then with a dropout as the protagonist.  I guess you could say it was somewhat of a fantasy for me back in those days—even my contribution for the writing portion of our TAKS exam* was about someone who had dropped out of college in her freshman year but couldn’t bring herself to come clean to her parents. Once again, I had to preface it with a note stating that the best way I felt I could answer their prompt was through this imagined scenario. This pseudo-essay was ultimately deemed “highly effective” and given a 4, the highest possible score.

To add to my clearly complicated memories of high school, popular culture in America has always treated The College Admissions Essay as some sort of rite of passage for teenagers transitioning into adulthood.  There is so much focus on it—not only in the news but also in the fictionalized stories we discover in YA novels and teen soaps.  Everyone is struggling to figure out what to write, how to define him or herself, and how to stand out from the rest of the pack as they vie for acceptance into their so-called “dream school.” As school was certainly not something I dreamed about with anything resembling positivity in those days, this very notion was foreign to me. Of course, when I started applying to graduate schools six years later (this time around, I applied to 8 separate schools and got into 4), I wrote plenty of personal essays. But by that time I was no longer a teenager—I was a completely different person at a completely different stage of my life.  It was not the same.  And for personal reasons I won’t waste time delving into here, I also refused to walk at my high school graduation. So yes, despite (begrudgingly) completing all the necessary credits and passing the exit exam with flying scantrons and #2 pencils, a part of me did feel that perhaps I never really graduated from high school.

I was personally inspired by and a bit envious of the situation described in the New York Times article because some of these newer, more delightfully bizarre essay prompts are exactly the type of thing that invite and reward creativity and innovative thinking, one of the few things I excelled at in high school. While my friends and I were conceiving the idea for this blog series, we did briefly consider writing our essays as our teenage selves. The idea appealed to me; however, I was such an unbearable and obnoxious person back then (as I am constantly reminded of any time I read a blog post written back in those days—some of these things still exist online!) that I felt such an undertaking would be counterproductive. At the same time, I make the promise to approach my essays with a certain amount of innocence regarding the future and what it might mean for me as I go “back to school.”

* The TAKS (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills) is the 5-part exit exam everyone had to pass in 11^th grade to graduate from a public high school in Texas back when I graduated from high school in 2005.  It replaced the TAAS test that most of us had been raised with, and is currently being phased out by the STAAR (State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness) test. I believe the writing prompt for that year was about the ramifications of keeping secrets.