Tips for The COVID Supplement: View from Your Window
In an unprecedented move, in unprecedented times, The Common App has added a COVID Supplement.
This essay is a great opportunity both for students and for admissions.
The Common App made this move in response to requests from people working in admissions at colleges and universities across the country:
“We are grateful for the feedback we received from our college and university members and the counseling community about how to help students share how the current health crisis has impacted them personally and educationally. The goal is to have a central place for students and counselors to describe their experiences due to COVID-19 only once while providing colleges and universities the information they need to understand each student’s unique context.”
The COVID Supplement gives students an opportunity to describe their experiences and express their feelings about a global situation which impacts everyone but to which each individual responds uniquely.
Not only is this supplement advantageous to the student. It also gives admissions a window into the minds and hearts of the students whom they are considering in relation to a challenge that faces us all.
Why pass up an opportunity to give admissions a broader or wider view of yourself?
From The COVID Supplement, admissions will be able to see how you handle adversity, how you make sense of a situation none of us could have anticipated, how you find creative solutions and personal ways to survive and thrive in the face of this pandemic.
Fairly early in the game, a Facebook group called View From My Window popped up and became all the rage. The premise is that people Share and Connect by posting a “view from [their] window.”
There are now over 2 million followers to this group and the moderators are completely overwhelmed!
If you’d like to see some of these images, you can find them here.
What does View From My Window have to do with The COVID Supplement?
When students are asked to write about their own experiences, they often freeze. The blank page can be daunting. It’s one thing to write about the causes of the Second World War and another to write about your response to the pandemic.
I often suggest students start where they are.
This is similar to the idea of connecting with others in these isolated times by posting a view from your own window.
In writing, this translates to giving the reader a view into your world, as it is, or as you see it, the view that is right in front of you or inside you. Of course, you never know once you start writing where the words will take you.
As William Saroyan describes in “Starting with a Tree and Finally Getting to the Death of a Brother”:
How do you write? My answer is that I start with the trees and keep right on straight ahead . . . I start with these companions of place, each fixed into the soil of where it is, and sometimes the rock or rocks, and very little else, and after that the going is not only easy, it is very near rollicking.
A writer writes, and if he begins by remembering a tree in the backyard, that is solely to permit him gradually to reach the piano in the parlor upon which rests the photograph of the kid brother killed in the war.
Recently, I was struck by a beautiful articulation of this very same idea by my good friend Erin Van Rheenen who is offering a writing class entitled: A Sense of Place: Writing Your Own Backyard:
“We love new places in part because they yank us out of the ordinary, allowing us to see with new eyes,” says instructor Erin Van Rheenen. “We notice the quality of light, the lilt of the local accent, or the startling architecture of how water meets land.”
In this online course, Erin invites students to turn that fresh gaze on their current surroundings, mining the depths of their daily routines, however impacted by the current crisis, and celebrating the marvelous in the familiar . . .”
Writing the view from your window is what I’m suggesting you try as you begin thinking about The COVID Supplement.
What view you choose is up to you. It can of course be the one facing your own backyard and/or the one facing inward to the glass bottom boat of your heart and mind.
Along these same lines, I have found some of the poems in Alice Quinn’s pandemic anthology: Together in a Sudden Strangeness, America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic to be doing exactly what I’m suggesting here.
Witness this poems by Garrett Hongo:
Watching the Full Moon in a Time of Pandemic
I watch the full moon’s light
slide like silver water through the silhouettes
of trees that cast long shadows over mounds
and rocks, a hidden stream, and the expanse of lawn.
I think back to when I played hide-and-seek games with cousins
at the shoreline,
Pūpūkea near Shark’s Cove on Oʻahu,
dodging in and out of the shadows
of ironwood trees.
We hid amidst the vapors of murk
mixed with sea spray and wild laughter, sought
one another in sands under the glassy moonlight that
splashed our bodies like surf.
We stood as though rooted, silent while
sighs from the sea carried through cool
night air.
I was four or I was five and I was not Leanne
or Neal or Kerry, but myself,
counting my own breath, one with the dark,
gazing at the silver gleam of heaven’s road
making its path from below the moon
across heaving, purple waters to where
I stood as I do tonight, sixty years from that first
shining. I told it to my daughter,
who hid in moonshade, isolate and lonely,
missing the welter of what life had been,
her father five as a child unfathomable, her
slim form disappearing, while I stood, seeking.
Together in a Sudden Strangeness (pp. 76-77). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Here the poet starts with a description of himself watching the moon from his own backyard (which reminds him of when he was a child) and comes to the sense that he can only describe himself, and be himself, no one else:
I was four or I was five and I was not Leanne
or Neal or Kerry, but myself,
counting my own breath, one with the dark . . .
So, too, are you you.
COVID SUPPLEMENT TIP OF THE DAY: Write your own backyard. And see where the river, or moonlight, rain or parlor take you.
I will be hosting a two-week COVID SUPPLEMENT WRITING ZOOMINAR in August. Stay tuned for the announcement!
