College Admission Essays: A Show-Not-Tell Essay Example

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Below is an example of a show-not-tell college admission essay.

As the clock struck midnight I grinned. I had completed the Computer Science project, and the rudimentary Spanish, Russian, and Math assignments. It was time to progress to the night’s confection: my European History treatise. The project had been assigned four days earlier, on Monday, but I had not yet begun. I had trimester finals throughout the week, and had just returned home from competing in the Ivy League Winter Track Championship. My body yearned for sleep, but I worked hard to overcome my desires. I put on the teakettle and dove into the assignment, for I did not want to disappoint my fellow members of the colloquium.

I was to prepare a presentation on Sir Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox. After reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace for Russian class, I thought it would be interesting to read what the esteemed twentieth century historian had to say about him, so I had volunteered for the task. I read his treatise, with Wagner pulsating in the background and an amber light shining on my desk. As I delved into the book, a surreal sensation emerged of feeling like a twenty-first century Machiavelli, indulging in my texts about the past.

Two hours and one and a half pots of tea later, I had completed Berlin’s work. The key concept was that the hedgehog knows just one thing, but knows it well, whereas the fox knows many things but lacks a depth of knowledge. Tolstoy had depth and breadth to his knowledge, fitting both classifications. Plagued with fatigue and sloth, I created a simplistic one-page pamphlet explaining what Berlin had said and its implications.

As I wrote, the theme of hedgehogs and foxes reverberated in my mind, and I started classifying people accordingly. I went through our texts and categorized the major figures. Drifting away from the assignment and into the world of intellectual history, I saw everything through the eyes of Berlin. From the darkness, I heard the grandfather clock strike four, and had little documented work with two and a half hours until I would have to wake up.

Recalling the first day of class when we had discussed who we thought were the twenty most influential people in history, I decided it would be sensible to use this list as my groundwork. Time was a luxury I did not possess, so I used the one tool that could provide me with enough information to make an informed decision: the Internet. As a historian and a bibliophile, I am weary of using the Internet for historical research, but it was the only tenable option.

Once I had categorized the twenty giants and justified my classifications, the time had crept up to five-thirty, and I had built a raw five-page pamphlet for the class. The next thing I can remember was being awakened by my mother at six-thirty, alarmed that my head was face-down on my desk, Wagner was playing on repeat-mode on my computer, eight tea bags were strewn across my desk, and one hundred pieces of paper were resting on the printer’s till.

The colloquium was appreciative of my work, but could not grasp why I would spend most of my night working like a Trojan for a simple presentation. When asked, I could not really answer them. It surely was not to get the ‘A’ on the assignment as many of my colleagues had suspected. I think it was a mix of my love for academia, my desire to please the class, and the warm feeling I got inside whenever my teacher saw me in the halls and told me “Good work."