Since the beginning of time, editors at The Nassau Weekly have taken their pens to each other’s Common Application essays. And yes, The Nassau Weekly has been around since the beginning of time. Here, in the billionth incarnation of this segment since the great Mother Nature birthed our tiny planet into its tiny and insignificant existence, editors Katie Duggan and Carolyn Kelly compete in the nearly-timeless contest: who was the most insufferably pretentious college applicant? This is an ancient ritual. This is Peer Review.
Why eviscerate each other’s college application essays in public, you might ask? The answer is simple: nothing proved as satisfactory a measure of “getting here” as the Common Application. Also, FERPA did not exist at the beginning of time. And in truth, if we weren’t such lazy shits, we would’ve gone and FERPA’d ourselves to find out what the hired hands in the admissions office thought about our cringeworthy attempts to distinguish ourselves within a mass of similarly indistinguishable people. But instead, we emailed our mothers to scan our essays so that we could do this. Now, like our foremothers and forefathers before us, we don the armor of ancient Nass warriors and face off in the Roman coliseum of public opinion, tearing apart each other’s rhetoric in the name of Good Clean Fun.
Perhaps reading this will cause you to recall your own college application process fondly. Perhaps you have already blocked that traumatic period from your memory. But Peer Review is a didactic exercise designed to show that even if you are a whitebread sadboy stuck in the early 2000s or a chemically imbalanced chemist with daddy issues, you can still find a home inside the FitzRandolph gates. And who knows, you just might end up editing The Nassau Weekly.
