Blockbuster Syndrome

Every now and then everyone gets a big old hit of blockbuster syndrome, but as I sit here staring at my common apps I wonder if there's ever a time where blockbuster syndrome is necessary.

The questions are simple - Why do you want to apply for your major? What makes you want to go to this school? What do you like about our program? Nothing really too difficult, so it shouldn't take me a week and a half to give 100 word answer for each question.

But it does take me a week and a half to write a paragraph, and the reason is fairly obvious. It's blockbuster syndrome. I want every idea to be my greatest ever, every sentence to be the best ever written, and every comma to be the most beautifully placed comma that the admissions officer has ever seen.

So now the question is, is blockbuster syndrome hurting or helping me?

While the writing may be really thought out, it might be worse than a casually written blog post. Less from the heart and more from a robot. And who wants a robot attending their top tier school?

Then there's also the whole time thing. (Especially when you're applying to 15 schools, with 8 of them being early action with november deadlines.)

I guess I'll go back to figuring out things to tell my safety schools when they ask me why I'm applying...

Stac Wide Web

When STAC was initially given the mural assignment, I couldn't of cared less about the meaning of it. I was sure Luke had something great and meaningful to tie it all together with, but I was so engulfed by the image of the project that the value of it had become completely secondary. I had envisioned this beautiful, huge, web of words that was completely neat but completely messy at the same time. I imagined the words to be much larger, and to be planned out better and more uniformly. In my head it was this gorgeous thing of epic proportions that at first overwhelmed the viewer so much that it seemed impossible to read, but once the reading would actually begin it would become a simple task. I imagined something that you would see as a museum display.

Reality was far from imagination. Reality was chaos in differently sized and spaced words. Reality was writing that overwhelmed you not only as you look at it but also as you plunged into reading it. But I think reality might of been a lot more fulfilling.

If we really did spend the time to make it perfect - to use the stencils, and organize our thoughts, and create the layout - it may of not had the same affect. The way we did it allowed us to go into ourselves to see why we like the things we like, find connections, reasons, and more connections, and then some connections with other STACies. It was satisfying.

My imagination would of brought another kind of satisfaction - the kind of satisfaction that would of been more "factory" driven. The satisfaction of something beautiful. Reality brought the satisfaction of discovery.