Ah, the college essay. The beast made up of an engaging introduction, a powerful conclusion and as many body paragraphs as you need to fulfill your minimum page requirement. Every college student has faced this at least a few times. If you're an English major, like me, you've written so many essays that you could cite something in MLA format with your eyes closed at this point. Just essays upon essays.

I know lots of academic writing kind of comes with the English major territory, and I know that I like writing (usually), but sometimes really hard essays can still have me hoping to never open another Word document ever again. Or Google doc, depending on your preferences. I once knew a guy who liked to write essays in his Notes app on his phone. I will never understand that.

Even though it won't exactly break my heart to say goodbye to the college essay when I graduate, I've still found myself getting sentimental in my senior year as I read and write some of my last essays. I'm currently in a class where we workshop and offer opinions on each other's papers. Thanks to this class, I've now been able to learn about Chaucer's religious satire, the Southern Gothic genre, and the feminist themes of Little Women -- all because people wrote essays on those topics. They became mini-experts on really random, unique topics just for their essays, and I think that's cool. There's no better way to learn about something than writing 10 cited pages on it.

This class also made me think back on my papers of years past. The first paper I ever wrote at Butler was a personal statement assignment for my first-year seminar. My professor asked us just to write a 3 or 4 page paper about ourselves: our families, our goals, our interests. It was a flexible, creative paper, meant to be low pressure.

I agonized over it. Little freshman me re-wrote it at least three times, thinking up errors where there were none. I finally submitted it three whole days early because I was overly nervous about time management. Now, I would have written that paper in one try all the night before it was due, and I still would have gotten an A on it. A personal statement essay? Why was I even stressing back then?

Since then, I've matured in my essay-writing. I've written about everything from the Salem witch trials to Baroque painters to Huck Finn to the history of Confucianism. I've analyzed poems, paintings, and even plant anatomy for the one science class I've taken. Admittedly, I won't miss having to stay up all night just to finish my annotated bibliography or to make sure my introduction is engaging enough, but I think I will miss having an excuse to learn about all kinds of things I would never have looked up without the essay assignment. So, thanks for that, college essay. It's been real.