The Scholarship Essay

1 The first version of Maren Lundgren's scholarship essay had everything the advice websites recommended. It opened with a thunderstorm, used the word "passion" four times, and described a single afternoon of hospital volunteering during which she had supposedly decided to devote her life to medicine. The difficulty was that the afternoon had never actually happened. Maren had spent that week in a hospital basement, sorting donated paperbacks into cardboard boxes, and the only thing she had decided was that she disliked the smell of damp cardboard.

2 Her English teacher, Mr. Dunleavy, returned the draft with one sentence penciled at the bottom: "Who is this person?" Maren assumed he meant the essay was too vague, so she added two adjectives and a statistic about the national shortage of nurses. The draft came back two days later with the same question, now underlined twice. Maren found the repetition mildly insulting, since she had followed every rule the websites offered, and as far as she could tell she had followed them correctly.

3 That night, at the kitchen table, she finally tried to answer it honestly, as though it were a genuine question. The girl in the essay was confident, certain about her future, and faintly heroic. The girl at the table worked twenty hours a week at her uncle's tire shop, could read a tread gauge faster than most of the mechanics, and had no idea what she wanted to study. The second girl, Maren suspected, was considerably less likely to win four thousand dollars. For a long moment she considered deleting the honest notes and inventing someone even more impressive, the way she sometimes changed lanes in slow traffic simply to feel that she was getting somewhere.

4 Still, she began to write about the girl at the table. She described a January morning when a woman arrived with a flat tire, two children asleep in the back seat, and a job interview in forty minutes. While the tire was being patched, the woman had cried quietly in the waiting room, not from fear but from relief, and Maren had kept stacking invoices and pretended not to notice, because noticing would only have embarrassed her. She explained what she had learned by watching her uncle: how to work quickly without making a frightened customer feel rushed, and how to say "You're all set" as though it had been no trouble at all. She admitted that she did not yet know what she wanted to become, but she knew how she wanted to work: carefully, and in front of people who were having a difficult day.

5 The honest version was shorter, and it had no thunderstorm. Mr. Dunleavy read it during lunch while Maren pretended to eat a granola bar. He offered no particular praise. He simply handed it back, and beneath his old question he had written a new line: "Now I'd like to meet her." Maren submitted the essay at 11:52 that night, eight minutes before the deadline, and for the first time all fall she did not read it again.