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Friday February 2, 2007

When it comes to college essays, three JCHS grads know the secrets

by liz harris
staff writer

You’ve taken the SATs, the achievement tests, the toughest high school courses you could handle. And after ad nauseum research about possible choices and too many heart-to-hearts with well-meaning adults, you’re finally ready to start the college application process.

Then along comes the dreaded essay. What to write about? How to make it sing? And most importantly, will it land you admission?

Three 2005 graduates of Jewish Community High School of the Bay share their winning essays in the “Real College Essays That Work,” by Edward B. Fiske and Bruce G. Hammond. The authors, who’ve collaborated on a number of respected college guides, submit that the 109 essays in the 2006 book are excellent examples.

“The best essays come from high school students being themselves, with all the depth, wit, charm and quirkiness that they bring to their daily lives,” the authors write in the introduction. “A good essay reflects the best qualities of its author — nothing more, and nothing less.”

The essays by Ross Bercun, Samantha Strauss and Daria Tabak were submitted by Geoffrey Smith, JCHS director of college advising. Responding to a mass emailing that went out to some 9,000 counselors nationwide, Smith sent five for consideration.

Ross Bercun of Larkspur wrote about his experience onstage in “Actor’s Nightmare.”

“I think that the purpose of the college essay is to kind of convey who you are as a person,” Bercun, a sophomore studying media arts at the University of Arizona, said in January.

With a fair amount of freedom to select a topic, Bercun went with his passion for the arts. “It sort of came to me,” he explained. “I was fresh out of doing this play, and it was still on my mind how disappointed I was that I really didn’t get to bow” at the end.

His essay, the first in a chapter on “The Arts,” begins this way:

“There I sit, just having eaten a big bucket full of butterflies. They are fluttering about inside my stomach. A warm ball of energy gathers in my chest, and all other problems of the past day, week and year disappear. All that exists is my moment and I.”

When he learned his piece was chosen for publication, “it was, like, cool,” he recalls. “My mom, she’s so proud. I’ve never really been a good writer.”

Now, says the son of Brenda and Corey Bercun, “my mom sort of looks at me like [I’m a] college essay expert.”

Daria Tabak, an Oakland native now attending Oberlin College in Ohio, was also nonplussed. “It was very flattering, but I was also kind of embarrassed because I didn’t think it was that good.”

Her parents, Gail and Gene Tabak, thought otherwise. “My mom showed a copy of the book to everyone.”

Her essay begins:

“On May 30, 2004, I woke up to bloodcurdling screaming that I’d only heard in horror movies.” It was her mother, yelling that their house was on fire. Tabak ran downstairs, “grabbed my old, senile dog by the collar,” and fled to the safety of a neighbor’s home across the street.

Their house burned to the ground. But the experience, she wrote, “was a turning point in my life” due to the outpouring of emotional support that came her way. It “gave me a new perspective on the capacity for human generosity.”

The tragedy occurred at the end of her junior year, and soon after, Tabak says, people began telling her that the silver lining was, “now you have something to write about.”

Still, “I was very hesitant about doing it, because I thought it was sort of a copout. I thought it would sound phony,” she admits. But in the end, “it pretty much wrote itself.”

Strauss, who sought entry into a political communications program at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., discussed what motivated her to apply and how she would use the school’s resources to meet her educational goals.

One of the main points in the book is that a good essay needn’t be a masterpiece or scholarly treatise. Rather, the authors selected essays “that exhibit outstanding qualities but also represent an attainable standard for significant numbers of students.”

Smith, the director of college advising at JCHS, agrees with their logic, noting, “I think their essays were appropriate to the schools to which they applied.”

Tabak transferred to JCHS as a sophomore. “I was hoping to broaden my horizons,” she says of her stint at Berkeley High, her first public school. “I’ve gone to Jewish institutions starting from preschool.” A graduate of Tehiyah Day School in El Cerrito, Tabak, who describes her family as “not at all religious,” also attended Jewish summer camps and took a year off after high school to go to Israel, where she worked on a kibbutz, took classes and did community service.

JCHS, says Tabak, ”was incredibly good for me.”

Bercun spent four years at JCHS. At first, he balked at the idea of attending a Jewish school. But he soon discovered that his fellow students “were just like normal kids,” and he especially liked Rabbi Ed Harwitz, the former principal, with whom he is still in touch.

In retrospect, he attributes his initial anxiety about the school to typical adolescent contrariness — “I’m a teenager, I don’t like anything.”

Truth be told, his years at JCHS “absolutely changed” his attitude toward Judaism, says Bercun. “I became more concrete in my Jewish identity.”

At Arizona, he helps lead services at his campus Hillel and joined a Jewish fraternity. And in the spirit of his essay, he hopes to go to graduate school in New York City and become a film actor.

“Real College Essays That Work” by Edward B. Fiske and Bruce G. Hammond (343 pages, Sourcebooks Inc., $14.95).