How To Get Into College

Neil Chakravarty, Backpage Editor

Prompt: Please tell our college admissions committee about some of your favorite activities to do in your spare time.

In most regards, you could call me a pretty average kid. When I’m not taking a break from my 16 AP classes-worth of homework, you can usually find me relaxing and listening to the Dalai Lama’s Greatest Hits on eco-friendly cassette while kicking back in my armchair and sipping a nice, cold glass of non-alcoholic lite beer. In fact, my armchair (along with all the other furniture in my house) was handbuilt by myself while taking breaks from building the particle accelerator in my basement. But don’t worry, I promise that when I really get down and dorky, things really heat up.

Besides the occasional time I spend writing computer code for the NSA, the CIA, and the OBGYN, I enjoy further practicing my computer skills by handcrafting braille keyboards for blind children in the Philippines and doing software consultation work for clients from both Microsoft and Apple. People frequently ask me where I came to acquire my exceptional computer skills. The credit I must inevitably owe to my internship with the late Steve Jobs himself. There was nothing better than hanging out with “Saucy Steve” and throwing darts at his favorite dartboard of Bill Gates’s face.

Of course, my interests do not stay confined to the narrow field of computer science. A few years ago when I happened to have tea with the Queen of England, she introduced me to the incredibly exhilarating world of competitive knitting; in fact as of now, I am currently a varsity member and a captain of my school’s one-man competitive knitting team. Of course, since competitive knitting is yet to catch on in this country, I have to travel to central Asia for most of my meets. Not to be immodest, but I am scheduled to soon knit against Boobla the Crazy from Uzbekistan for the All Central-Asia Championship. In order to fundraise for the airfare, I plan on selling great deal of my signature hand-knit dog socks.

Not all of my activities however are as intense as my favorite sport, competitive knitting. Although I do not advertise it blatantly, I have a great and eternal passion for community service. From a young age, I have always enjoyed taking long rides on the beach in my favorite tricycle, so recently I combined my love of riding tricycles and community service by starting Venturing with Vegetables: a program that provides comatose senior citizens with refreshing tandem tricycle rides by assigning them a teenage “pedalling pal” to do the pedaling for them.