A Letter to the Brown Admissions Board

My dear Brown University Admittance Committee,

Thank you for your interest in reading my application. I suppose aren’t reading it so much with an interest in me, but rather in keeping up with your important work at your important person job. Nevertheless, thanks for showing up. That’s often the hardest part.

Since I was a young girl, it has always been a dream of my mother’s that I would go to Brown. It was something about letting me fly on my own, being in a place that would support my unique passions while also letting her brag that her kid went to Brown.

From my understanding, one of your most popular college essay prompts is your prompt asking about an applicant’s “dream major”. Brown was the first of its kind to permit students to design a major that they felt would adequately suit their specific and unique interests in order to serve them in their life as successful professionals that would contribute to the world. This is the prompt which I have chosen.

However, I’m not sure if even Brown can offer what I seek. I am unsure where to begin on the path towards my aspirations to make the earth’s nights a bit sweeter and fuller, and the days more peaceful. This is because although my mother has always dreamt of me going to Brown, I have always dreamt of being a barn owl. A western barn owl specifically, swooping silently through rustling pines and over the tall grasses in a windy California valley. I would settle down in a nice cavity in a tree where I could decorate the place with different lichen and moss I find in my travels and sleep more peacefully than I ever have; away from AP tests and the pressure of knowing what to comment on my friends’ Instagram posts.

I realize that this makes me sound like a weird bird kid, which I don’t entirely deny. And I realize that it’s a lot that I ask. I mean, majoring in “Becoming a barn owl”? Perhaps it's time to start looking through the phone book for the witchiest name I can find, something like Tabitha Ringfrog or Delilah Mulberry, in hopes that they might have the potion I’m looking for to let me live the life I dream of.

For me, it’s not necessarily about the flying or chasing down mice. It’s rather that becoming an owl feels like a real choice that I can desire for myself, and only for myself. It’s a choice without regard to the systems that give my generation the existential dread we wake up with each day.

I don’t want to do person things and contemplate the morality of having children or thrift shopping. I don’t want to worry about which deodorant I buy at Rite-Aid will leave me feeling the most satisfied with my purchase and the least guilty about plastic packaging. Honestly, I don’t know how to participate and plan to succeed in a world that has so much that is failing. There are endless things to do and so little time.

But, right now, the days are short and the nights feel long and I can only imagine at each sunset what it would feel like to be waking up with a fierce fervor to take on a dark new world that is bright with potential. To find that mouse, and ruffle those feathers on my back, and call out that perfectly articulate screech. I want to be unafraid to screech into the night when I need to, spilling my truths and demanding what I need. I wish we all could gift ourselves that freedom.

I want to dance with pallid bats under a shining moon and sing with choruses of crickets near a bubbling creek. I want to peek out of my home to see towering redwoods that know of a world before NFTs and Amazon. I want to go to sleep with a warm sun on my face, without regard to any late-night texts or calls, besides that one quiet call from within for peaceful slumber and sweet dreaming.

Now, I know I sound ridiculous and goofy, and I don’t honestly want to give up on this human world. I love my family, blood and chosen, and I know that I must speak from a place of a lot of privilege to be ignorant enough to just run away. And I also know that I don’t personally know any witches yet. So for now, I am here to stay.

But Brown University Admittance Board, please do me this one last favor of looking up images of a teenage barn owl. I would encourage looking at images of barn owls of all ages, but I feel like in most places, we forget about the teenagers who might need us to remember them the most. Adult barn owls are sleek and beautiful, gentle in the face and soft in color. As babies, they look adorably scraggly and fluffy, and most non-birders can still appreciate their fuzzy charm. But the teenagers? Teenage birds look ridiculous. Their baby eyebrows and shoulder feathers are the last to be replaced by their adult plumage, so for that time of late adolescence, they look almost adultish and fierce, but their utterly ridiculous eyebrows and unpracticed flapping give them away. A teenage barn owl might have aspirations of the grandeur of ruling his land, but for now, he can’t hide his clumsy, lovable self.

Like him, I find myself to be a ridiculous teenager. A fledgling barn owl or a moody 18-year-old with a lot of big ideas and little independence, it doesn’t matter. Lovable goofs may be difficult and demand to be taken seriously, and they might be insistent that their three-month-long romance is true love, and that when they grow up, they want to be an owl. But, all adolescents, no matter what a goof they are, deserve patience and peace of mind.

I am where I am and I deserve peace and gentleness as I seek my way into more graceful and wise adulthood. As a human or other, I will eventually find places to dance under the moon and listen to a gentle sway of trees and bubbling water at night. One day, I will know peace and self-assuredness (I hope) and I will find the courage to screech when I need to. One day, I will be bold and sleek and know how to share myself with the human world while protecting the dreamer that lives inside me. I have decided, that when I grow up, I will live as the barn owl does, even if that means being a human while doing it.

So please, Brown University Admissions Committee, please let me into your prestigious human school so I can be the first to major in “Becoming an Owl”. And if it’s really not going to work, I can settle for Biology.

This has been the hardest part. I am being brave and screeching my thoughts and I am showing up. And while I know I might seem ridiculous, I’m granting myself the patience and peace of mind I deserve. I wish for you the same, the courage and vitality to be a dreamer, even when it feels silly.

So thank you again for your time, and for showing up and taking interest in my application.

Cheers to us on this bright night, a new day has just begun.