Bennington College

...from the Application Essays of the Class of 2010

First Lines from the Application Essays of the Class of 2010

As we welcome the class of 2010 to Bennington, we celebrate their arrival with a sampling of first lines from some of their application essays. We invite you to imagine what these new students will write four years from now as the first line of their senior essays*.

We are creating a wheel.
The day I told my mother I was a channel for John Lennon was the day my mother got her first gray hair.
When I was young, I was color blind.
If I am not constantly busy or trying new things, I feel moldy.
In my physics class last year, we performed an experiment with light.
After moving five times by the first grade, I believed that your location was like a souvenir you found offered up by the waves: pretty but insignificant.
Joshua Norton declared himself Emperor of the United States and "protector of Mexico" on September 17, 1859.
In America I am Polish-Ukrainian-Jewish and Irish. In Martinique I am white.
During the summer following my graduation, I was thinking in depth about what I wanted in a college education, and came to the conclusion that my current plans were not it.
I had three hundred and fifty eight secrets that were not mine.
Poverty afflicts billions of people worldwide, and I am one of those afflicted.
My mother had to teach and my father was in Mexico the summer I climbed on a Greyhound bus with a brimming backpack and a one way ticket to Hurricane Island, Maine.
There are only three sections of the paper that I read on a daily basis: the comics, the weather, and the obituaries.
It was 4 am, and the first thing I would think about was calling my grandmother to tell her about my dream.
If I were to design a library, it would be in the shape of a sprawling flower whose skeletal structure would be made of steel encased by curvaceous colored Plexiglas.
When I was seven, I used to make a mental list of the time periods and cultures I would have liked to live in.
By the time you read this, I will already have been to Jonestown, Mississippi.
Galileo Galilei once said, "All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them."
The walk from my house to school has become slippery recently.
Sometimes you can discover things, truths, thousands of times and have it never really hit you--epiphanies abound.
The place is neither secret nor obvious.
If five hundred words would be divided amongst my sixteen years, I would end up as some ancient tribes of the Northern plains do, summarizing each year in one sentence, known as the "winter count."
I first discovered Ernest Hemingway when I read A Movable Feast.
Not long ago I had a dream that I was a novice in a great and mystic order.
I am just a toddler when I am first placed on a fishing boat and taught how to walk.
Standing barefoot in my swimsuit in the white washed hospital in Florida, I already knew the news my mother and I were anxiously waiting to hear.
I believe in books the way some people believe in God.
When I was little I wanted to be a vampire.
While filming and editing a documentary entitled Finding Purple, I recently encountered the importance of respect in resolving conflicts.
In my sophomore year I became deeply involved in animal rights.
When I realized what human nature meant as a force of destruction, I was thirteen years old.
A Speedway gas station and Arby's restaurant may be coming to Granville, but not without a fight from the Granville Village Council.
The ferry rocked as we made our way towards the shore.
My friends usually cringe when I have them watch the film Harold and Maude.
I admit, a major focused exclusively on Japanese culture and language may not be a popular choice.
Watching people in this murmuring place, I am transfixed.
I thought I had an understanding of poverty and political conflict, having lived in Nepal for five months after my high school graduation.
The bus stops next to a small red and gray house.
Everything that I wrote about really happened.
A chair.

*In their senior essays, students look back over the entirety of their Bennington education and forward to their next steps for life after graduation. The senior essay is the last step in the Plan Process, the basic structure of the Bennington education. Click here to read more about the Plan.

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