Everyone knows that the hardest part of college applications isn’t writing essays about how a mission trip changed your worldview or coming up with clubs to be founder/president of—it’s convincing admissions officers that you’re more suitable than the 2x Nobel Prize winning, Forbes starring, board-certified neurosurgeon (age 8) who also happened to invent the concept of both string instruments and string theory. Fortunately, with the right guide (this one), you too, can sound like the second coming of Pla-arist-ocrates.
Commandment I: Always Pause Before Speaking
……The art of pausing is delicate… every undertaker treads a fine line between profundity and perplexity… Pause as if you’ve glimpsed into their soul, peering into the depths of their very being, as if you’ve unlocked the clandestine veracities of reality and metaphysics, and time itself has slowed to accommodate your percipient wisdom.
Commandment II: Reference Classical Literature
Even if you haven’t exactly read War and Peace or Great Expectations, referencing literature is easier than it seems (certainly easier than killing a pawnbroker or stealing bread). Confidence is key, and chances are, your interviewer hasn’t read all 864 pages of Anna Karenina either. If you drop some vague allusion with a double-wink, they’ll most likely chuckle and hit you with an equally ambiguous nod, leading to both the best and worst of times (you might want to get out of the damned spot).
Commandment III: (Politely) Inform (in-) Them of the Latin Roots of Every Word They Vocalize (vocare)
Nothing (nihil) will impress your interviewer (inter-, videre) more than dazzling them with your extensive (ex-, tenere) knowledge (scio, scire) of Latin roots. Never let them speak a word (verbum) without your immediate (imediatus) etymological commentary, demonstrating both your vast array of skills and intellectual dominance (dominus, -ī). Even though Latin is a language of the past, it’s infiltrated into every aspect of our lives. After millenia of being studied, Latin will eventually be absorbed in reverse time, inventing time travel, and allowing you to know the questions before they’re even conceived in your interview’s consciousness.
Commandment IV: Integrate a Myriad of SAT Vocab into Every Carefully Constructed Grammatical Unit of Linguistic Expression
What else proclaims cerebral development like ascending to the arduous apex of diction—SAT vocabulary. An interview without a complex (for others) lexicon is simply idle chit-chat. Each sentence gliding out of your oral cavity should be a testament to the collective spiritual consciousness of thesauri.
Commandment V: Achieve Enlightenment
“Why am I a good fit for your school?”
“Why is your school a good fit for me?”
As the spirits of college-apps past will tell you, the true path to an acceptance letter is to simply become the interviewer. Answer every question with metaphors and queries, probing deep into their hearts and souls, combing through their double-helixes, and finally arriving at the truth: the real admission decision, both inevitable and arbitrary, a reflection of not only your inner cosmos, but also a footnote in the exoplanets of institution, folds upon itself, weaving through the fabric of space and time, hybridizing into everything and nothing, all at once.
