Honor Scholar Program Admission Essay Prompts

Honor Scholar Program Admission Essay Prompts Miss Rumphius was patient and listened to herself, and so could find her place by the sea. My mother read me Miss Rumphius regularly before bed and from the redheaded heroine’s delicate tale, I crafted not only my goals in life, but my approach to adulthood as well. I have longed for this freedom all my life, and it has been my ultimate goal in pursuing colleges, careers, mentors, and even social circles. The narrator is a niece, so Miss Rumphius had to have had a sibling, but the young Alice speaks only of her aunt, and so was born my dreams of being an inspirational aunt myself. As a high school Latin student, I find this especially impressive. Rowling’s incorporation of Latin, the foundation of many modern languages, lends the spells more universality (who wants spells in English, anyway?) and adds to the realism of the series. Only through my own curiosity and self-motivated research have I learned to appreciate more than I had before. Surreal Numbers by Knuth helped me put what numbers are into more perspective. It is a rather slim book, yet because of its density it takes awhile to read in order to understand what it says. The story does not shy away from the dark and confusing. The characters struggle with death and injustice and poverty. We use these building blocks of math and numbers all of the time and yet we do not truly stop to think about what they are or why they work the way they do. I was one of those very people and I would be lying if I said that I fully appreciate math for what it is. Surreal Numbers follows a couple on vacation on an island. They find a rock with inscriptions written in Hebrew. After some rough translation and a lot of thought, they realize the slab talks about the logic process of classifying numbers. Neither of the two are mathematicians but they take upon the task and try to glean everything they can from the inscriptions. Somehow, I found the way this scenario was presented to be engaging and allowed me to be drawn into the story. Their first simple conclusion was that any number is the pair of sets to the left and right of that number. The inscription stated that any element of the left set is not greater than or equal to an element of the right setâ€"a very simple idea upon which to build a number system. It proceeds logically, then showing the recursive nature of numbers and how they build upon previous numbers. The beauty of this notion of sets is this idea that 0 is the origin of numbers. An easy focus of Rowling’s accessible wordplay are the spells. Usually a crafted mix of Latin and English, their verbalization sounds “magical” but still allows readers to suss out a guess as to the spell’s purpose. Like other fantasy writers who go by initials, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, Rowling summons foreign phrases, literary devices, and language jokes, and transfigures them into clever names for her characters, objects, and places. The works of Tolkien and Lewis reflect their authors’ knowledge of philology, but can veer into pretentiousness. Rowling seems to want as many readers as possible to share in the fun -- slogging through ancient Gobbledegook epics is not required. Specifically, let’s imagine that there were no elements in either the left or right set. Then the statement above about left elements and right elements would still be true as long as one of the sets has nothing. So you would start off with 0, and then you could get -1 and 1 by using 0 in the left or right set, and then it builds that way forever in both directions. There is no mention of her being involved romantically, marrying, or even considering a family - she is unapologetically independent. Despite this, there is a calm joy in her independence, and her adventures to faraway places seem to fill her life with meaning.