Since the beginning of time, editors at The Nassau Weekly have taken their pens to each other’s Common Application Essays. That all changes now. Peer reviews are no longer only fair game for editors—we, two lowly frosh staff writers (well, one staff writer and one layabout whose application is pending), still green with leftover high school try-hardism, have decided to take a crack at it as well. For the first time ever, freshwomen Sierra Stern and Beth Villaruz compete in the nearly timeless contest: who was the most insufferably pretentious college applicant? Who will use their multiracial identity more deftly as a tool to gain selective college admissions? This is an ancient ritual. This is Peer Review.
P.S.- We’re also roommates (oh my God, we’re roommates). Will we be able to face each other at family dinner tonight? Beth is making parsnip soup, and Sierra’s going back for seconds is contingent on a glowing 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 cringe-worthy 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.
There is a chance that if you are reading this, you are what we call a “prefrosh.” This is intentional. Peer Review is a didactic exercise designed to show that even if you are a white-bread 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 waiting for your staff writer application to be approved for the Nassau Weekly.
Sierra peer-edits Beth:
Beth peer-edits Sierra:
