Back when I applied to Macaulay, I remember that one of the essay options was to write about something currently going on that is political. This was around the time of he 2016 presidential election and of course, this was a very heated topic that everyone was talking about. When I sat down to write about the election, I thought it would be just any other essay I have written where I try to just get to work, but end up being distracted by the now ingrained in my mind notification sound from my phone. However, it did end up being a bit different this time because since it was a topic I already had thought a lot about and shared my opinions on with others, writing the actual essay ended up being a breeze and when I finished I was like “Wait, I’m done already?” The way this sort of changed my views on writing was it was the first time it made sense to me what teachers were talking about when they said if you write about a topic you are interested in and have no problem talking about, writing does not seem as bad and can actually be not horribly boring. If I am speaking honestly, I have never really been a big fan of writing even when I was a kid. I did sometimes like doing creative writing because I believe I was better at doing that as opposed to research papers or essays that give you some sort of question. The only piece of writing that I did that got publicly acknowledged in class by a teacher was in the fifth grade when we had to write a fictional story and mine was called “Snow Wars” and essentially about snowflakes at war with rain drops and involved lightsabers. And no, I did not do drugs back then I swear.

In the actual essay, I wrote about how I thought just about every candidate from the two major parties was a horrible choice and since I knew third-parties never win these things, I made one bold move in stating how I still preferred Trump to Hillary if one of them had to win. It was one heck of a “shiniest of two turds” situation and I thought at first maybe since this is Lehman it would be a bad idea to say my opinion but I took the risk because I wanted to be honest so I could fully show how I think and the opinions I hold. It worked out in the end I guess since I obviously got accepted into the program. My opinions on the subject matter have not really changed since then as I still think as bad as Trump can be, it was the better option over crooked Hillary and Bernie who basically wanted the economy to collapse. Oh yeah, there was also Ted Cruz but he’s the zodiac killer and I don’t think people would want a killer as president. The specific questions that I answered in this essay were basically along the lines of how I feel about the election and the candidates. I believe the prompt did not ask for answers to specific questions but just said to talk about the topic and bring up whatever you felt was necessary for discussion. I spent the essay talking about how it was disappointing to see that we have come to this point where all the major candidates for the President of the United States could end up being this bad. I also talked about how it seemed like this was perhaps a sign of things to come and that future races for the presidency would have more candidates like this as opposed to people fit for the job. Party alignment is becoming more and more prominent to the point where it doesn’t matter what views the candidate has, if they are of your party you will support them no matter what and won’t even entertain the idea of supporting an opposing parties candidate. In my essay, I also talked about the pros and cons of the candidates and being honest, there were not many pros too list. The questions, or topics in this case, that I avoided were talking specifically about the specific policies of the candidates and the ones that I agreed with. I avoided this because I did not want my essay to end up being too controversial as my goal was not to just have a controversial essay.

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