Snapshots not Scrapbooks

Snapshots not Scrapbooks

Have you ever had to watch a slideshow or scroll through a friend’s photos from an entire trip? How long did it take for your eyes to glaze over? Even gorgeous scenery starts to lose its beauty, and the photos blur together, when there are too many at once.

This may not be much of a summer for travel, but I can’t help thinking of summers past and flipping through my old scrapbooks and online albums. If you’re preparing to apply to college this fall, I recommend you do the same. You never know when (or where) you might find great evidence of growth.

Rereading pages of journaling, you might wonder, how do you summarize a month-long road trip with your family? a week backpacking in remote woods? your first exchange program? your last two weeks at your favorite summer camp? your first time traveling alone?

You don’t, of course.

What?! That’s right, you don’t. A week seems so short in the context of a life. It seems like it ought to be small enough to tackle, but it won’t work. You cannot summarize experiences of multiple days in 650 words and expect them to adequately convey your personality, feelings or growth.

So why am I encouraging you to dig up these memories? Simple. You don’t need a scrapbook—you need a snapshot.

We rarely notice moments of growth when they’re happening. But looking back, we can often recognize moments—either moments when a shift happened in your mind or your heart, or moments when that shift became visible to you or to others. When you’re combing your memories, those are the moments you’re looking for. Those are the moments you’ll write about.

Many students spend time doing volunteer work abroad, and they’re often told not to write about it. It’s too cliché. But a trip like that is a great place to start looking for your story of growth. The way you’re going to make the story yours and no one else’s is by zooming in. The more you summarize, the less personal the story becomes, and the less the reader learns about you and the kind of person you are. That’s when the piece can feel cliché. But if you search for the snapshots, you’ll make it your own. Don’t tell about the people you helped as any kind of group or abstract. Introduce specific characters. Don’t describe the place through what it lacked, but describe what you specifically saw. Don’t write, “There was no running water.” Write, “Plastic water jugs piled up in the town dump because only water from the store was safe to drink.” What specific parts of the experience challenged you the most? The more you focus in, the more you’ll remember.

(Photo by Daniel Mingook Kim on Unsplash)