Epoxy, anatomy, and college: my common app essay

Writing grad school essays, I’m reminded of my common app essay for college. It’s shorter than I remembered and surprisingly non-embarrassing for something I wrote 7 years ago. Without further ado, my common app essay.

A year ago, the calcium and carbon, now so well organized in compounds in the bones, were part of completely different molecules in plants. Nine months ago, they were woven into a complex living organism, scurrying up trees, while muscles, powered by a fast-beating heart, pulled and pushed against these bones. Thinking about the cycle of elements preoccupies my thoughts, as I contemplate the awesomeness of a system that builds life from atoms. It’s a cool day in July, and the plastic bag of squirrel bones has been sitting in my room for months, ever since I dissected the squirrel, which my puppy killed, to admire the then still heart and muscles and fed it to the dermestid beetles my biology teacher used to strip the flesh off of road-killed specimens. Although the science I get to do in university laboratories may come with high-tech toys, there’s still something appealing about sitting in my room, using tweezers to sort disarticulated bones in a foil lined cookie sheet.

Putting the squirrel back together is a lot more difficult than dissecting him. I appreciated the level of order in his body when I opened it up, but I appreciate it a lot more trying to duplicate it, as I experiment with which orientation of the atlas fits against the foramen magnum, and how to butt the ulna, radius and humerus together into an elbow. Even with two human anatomy books and a few websites of generic mammal bones, I’m still left wondering about how hips work in an animal that walks on four legs and has a tail. I make some guesses, and start applying epoxy to the parts I can identify. Under closer inspection the finger bones and tail bones are separable; the tail bones are more symmetric and the finger bones grooved and bumpy to align at the knuckles. The orientation of all the spinal projections gives hints toward their alignment. All the foot bones fit against each other to cradle the tibia.

The orderliness of this system is impressive. Eventually, I have an articulated skeleton, resembling the skeletons one sees in museums. In a fit of irony, I stand the skeleton upright so it looks like a miniature person with outsized skull and canines. Even if the vertebrae are in the wrong order, and the angles are not quite right, I’m still proud of my work, and it’ll still be one of those adventures I’ll remember for the rest of my life. Wherever I go to college, and moreover, wherever I go in life, I’ll never stop being fascinated by order and complexity and systems, and I’ll always want to study everything around me with the same analytic gaze with which I distinguished tail and finger bones.

P.S. I still have the squirrel skeleton in my room.