30 College Essays in 30 Days
Day 21: Cryptic Musings on Becoming a Man
Sometimes our best decisions start out as our worst. In June 2021, I went on a road trip with a dear friend from college (this was not the bad decision lol). The wave of Covid had finally begun to recede, and it was the first significant travel I had undertaken since the onset of the …
Day 22: 218 Cedar Street
Living by the mantra that “he who has the most toys, wins,” often leads to a messy house. When my parents sold the home where I was born, we moved the entire evidence of my childhood into my basement. And there it sat for many moons. 218 Cedar Street was a fascinating place. A giant …
Day 23: My Life Changed in a McDonald's Bathroom
While I find that practicing Islam in the West rarely causes open friction with societal norms, one area where this is less true is the practice of wudu. Wudu, or ritual ablution, is a prerequisite of salah, the five daily prayers that Muslims are enjoined to perform. Mosques and other Muslim institutions provide wudu areas, …
Day 24: Failure is Only a Dirty Word in School
The only C I ever got on my report card was in sixth-grade woodshop. The effects of this “failure” (to take a page out of my daughter’s distorted lexicon) have been pervasive. To this day, trips to Home Depot are my Waterloo and DIY projects make me question my masculinity. I can usually manage to …
Day 25: Ready-Fire-Aim
I’ve found that it’s usually better first to do, then to plan. This ready-fire-aim paradigm has served me well in life. Act first and figure out the why later. I don’t know, or more precisely only try to determine in retrospect, the origin of most of my most important decisions. My intention to make lifestyle …
Day 26: Teaching Good
My highest aspiration in the classroom is to teach good. I first came across this grammatically disillusioning concept when I read a close friend’s thesis at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and it has always stuck with me. Early in my career, when I was still learning the craft, I focused almost exclusively on …
Day 27: The Magic of Thinking Big
Unwittingly and with no forethought, I have positioned myself to use all the knowledge and wisdom from my years in the trenches to advise the top of society from below. I used to tell people that I had solved the big picture but had forgotten to sweat the small stuff. Finding Islam at the age …
Day 28: How to Write a College Essay
The idea of condensing all your life experiences into one pithy, 650-word personal statement fills nearly all of us with existential dread. #metoo. One of my most important roles as Director of College Placement at Al-Noor Academy, New England’s first full-time Islamic K12 school, is shepherding my charges through that terrifying rite of passage: the …
Day 29: I Don't Care Where You Go to College
Tony Jarvis, the legendary head of Roxbury Latin, an all-boys school renowned as one of the best in the country, used to give the same speech every year to the parents of the senior class: “I don’t care where your sons go to college. I don’t care what they do for a living. Our mission …
Day 30: Where Do We Go From Here?
So now that I’ve finally arrived at the end of this 30-for-30 challenge, the question naturally arises: what’s next? I think the hidden, even from me, agenda of this whole series was to figure out my 1, 5, and 10-year vision. With the caveat that all of this is not only subject to change, but …
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