Common App Idea: The Legend of Zelda

It's that time guys. The summer before senior year in high school is going to be full of college essay grinding. On top of my LunchTrak project, Gunn Alumni, and Elimination (blog post soon!), I will probably be dedicating several hours each week to writing my essays. Right now the plan is to get an hour of writing every day from 9 pm - 10 pm; no excuses.

Of course, it's no fun spending several hours writing about boring things, so I'm gonna write about things I'm actually interested in. For example, I'm playing around with writing about The Legend of Zelda in my Common App essay.

The Essay

I'm kinda lost on what to write about, so I looked online for some inspiration. One that stuck out to me was this guy's Stanford application on GitHub. https://gist.github.com/tonybruess/237ce55cdf701f7e1a41

I noticed that, while he does show a lot of different aspects of himself throughout the application, he made multiple mentions of his fascination for Apple and his hard work in his company, letting us see what his true passions are. I will probably also need to pick some common themes to best show who I am.

Theme

For my theme, I think I definitely want to highlight some of my achievements with coding. For the Common App essay, I could focus on the fact that playing Zelda sparked my passion for creating my own games, which in turn led me onto a path to do more coding. I built my first "game" on Khan Academy while I was in 3rd grade, and my first Unity game in 5th grade at a summer camp. After that, I taught myself web development, AI, and everything else that seemed interesting. Here's one way I was thinking of tying this story back to Zelda.

Learning to code is an adventure. There are so many places to explore, puzzles to solve, and friends to meet along the way. In 3rd grade, I discovered Javascript and dove headfirst into the world of game development.

With nothing more than an old laptop and a sense of curiosity, I started to look at this new world around me. There is so much to explore, where do I even start? The tutorial island taught me basic Javascript (and I was already comfortable writing basic logic), but now I'm in the real world; that simply isn't enough to build real things. Walking around, I discovered Unity, which is a pretty powerful yet simple game engine. At this point, I ran into some problems.

Turns out, coding is not so easy. I really struggled to learn Unity and it took me hours to wrap my head around basic concepts. Given that I was in a summer camp, my end result was pretty cool, but rather than understanding what I was doing, I was blindly copying the code in front of me. That didn't stop me though; one problem after another, I was slowly making progress.

Side Note: Ok I'm reading this over again and I don't think I'm gonna continue it. I think the parallels between Zelda to learning to code do exist, but it feels kind of forced and hard to explain. If I were to continue in this direction, I'd do something like this:

• I die over and over again, but each time I am building more awareness of my enemies and how to conquer them
• From each fallen enemy is a relic of my victory. Collecting these items gives me the toolset to build more complex things later on
• I see an opportunity for a difficult boss and I dive right in. Using my experience from defeating smaller enemies, I can navigate parts of the fight easily. But when the enemy pulls out a new attack, I am left defenseless; again, I must die over and over again to build a new attack strategy
• Once I have a couple of boss fights under my belt, I begin to feel more confident in my abilities. I venture far out into the world, completing puzzles and fighting monsters along the way. I can even share my knowledge with fellow travelers along the way, and they give back knowledge in return. Sometimes, we even take on boss fights together
• Now that I have the toolset and experience to thrive in this environment, coding becomes a lot more fun and I enjoy spending hours and hours building with it

Conclusion

Yeah... I'm not liking this either. I had a whole other draft about another spin on this idea, but I ended up scraping it. Anyways, that was fun writing, but I don't think I'm going to continue in this direction. Thanks for reading.