Aarons GRT Essay

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Aaron with the writing tutor

I, Aaron Bader, am clearly the best person available to become a GRT, and I will demonstrate my possession of “solid judgment, sensitivity, and the ability to work with students, colleagues, and faculty” with a rigorous mathematical argument using naught but the properties of a lemniscoid in irrotational, five-dimensional, Riemannian surfaces.

Ok, maybe not.

My undergrad institution, Cooper Union, was a place that rivals MIT as far as stressful environments go. Located in the laid-back atmosphere of downtown Manhattan, situated between three Starbucks, the school boasted about one-thousand students and engineering equipment last upgraded in the late ‘30s. Cooper also granted a full-tuition scholarship to all entering students, which was great for us thrifty folk, but was also dangerous in that the school refused to pay for a fifth year, so you were required to finish in four. In fact, if you failed to finish in four years, you would be paraded around Manhattan wearing a scarlet F, and everyone would laugh and throw half-eaten lemniscoids at you.

Most students’ approaches to coping with the stress was to spend every Friday, Saturday, and Thursday evening (and morning) getting drunk. I never enjoyed drinking, and still don’t, so I had to find different ways of retaining my perfectly balanced “solid judgment, sensitivity, and ability” to quote instructions. So I started playing the piano to relieve any kind of emotional and mental stress, and I started running to relieve the physical stress that usually crops up when sitting in a cramped Manhattan apartment for several hours trying to figure out why exactly a depression-era engine wasn’t performing quite as expected. I still can’t do either well, but that’s fine with me.

Now, I don’t imagine that my solution works for everyone. In fact it probably doesn’t work for anyone else, but I figured I’d let whatever committee that is reading this know about it. (By the way, that shirt looks really good on you)

Besides avoiding getting drunk, I also joined a fledgling society that was created to forge a link between students and ambassadors in our relatively small collegiate community. The many goals of the society included attending alumni events, creating student events, and trying to create some sort of school spirit that seemed conspicuously absent. Of course, all my grandiose plans were subtly undermined when I realized that all we really did was sit around, eat pizza, and plan events we would never get the funding for. So, it was kind of a bummer, but the free food was good. However, I did take matters into my own hands and created my own little game which was kind of similar to the MIT mystery hunt only much easier, as Cooper Union students are notoriously lazy.

I’m also a world-class Scrabble player. Don’t believe me? Well, I recently won $360 playing the game at a local tournament. I don’t see what bearing this has on anything, as knowing that there are two anagrams to “crapshooter” doesn’t really do much to start conversations, and it certainly doesn’t impress any women. (arthroscope, prothoraces) While I’m on the topic of useless information, I might as well mention the fact that I can say “I like to stick oranges in my bellybutton” in twenty languages.

I guess I should mention what I’m doing at this fine institution. I’m a first year grad student in Course 22 working on thermonuclear fusion. So somewhere in me, I probably still have that childhood notion that I will someday save the world, only now instead of defeating the evil Martians with my x-ray eyebeams, I will save it by calculating plasma instabilities. We can all dream, right?

Anyway, as you’ve probably noticed, I really enjoy out-of-the-ordinary activities, beyond the usual movie nights, potluck dinners, pub crawls and whatever the devil it is that kids do these days. I have a pretty creative imagination as well, and love to make/solve puzzles and to elicit creativity from wherever it may be found.

So perhaps, when reading the essays, you ask yourself: “How can we decide who will be a good GRT, and who is simply gunning for free housing?” Because, I know how the student officers in my current dorm, Tang, don’t do anything to improve the building, and instead of using the money that they are given to repair the tilted pool table and tune the piano, they spend it on an expensive weekend retreat to commend themselves on how good of a nonjob they are doing. This annoys me greatly, and you can be certain that nothing similar will happen with me.

So, in conclusion, I am 25 words over the limit.

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