Added college essay post

entries/other/my-college-essay.md

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+Students hate writing essays. It is easy to get wrapped up in the traditional 5
+paragraph essay which is dull and boring. When writing a college essay, you have
+more freedom since you are telling a personal narrative. Since you are writing a
+story, you want to make it interesting. You should not rephrase the prompt which
+you are responding to, and you should not write about anything that the
+admissions office already knows. Your application already mentions all the
+clubs, classes, sports, and volunteer service you do-- so don’t mention them.
+
+I don’t want to go off on a huge tangent about how to write the perfect college
+essay, I’m not an expert. However, I would like to share my personal college
+essay which got me accepted into RIT and Clarkson last year. As a computer
+science applicant, it is a great idea to write your college essay based on the
+programming experience you had outside of school.
+
+September 13, 2016
+
+>Prompt: Describe a problem you’ve solved
+>
+>/\* HTTP ERROR 500 \*/  
+>  
+>\#include\<stdio.h\>   
+> 
+>main()  
+>{  
+>printf("
+>
+>   On a dim screen in the corner of my room flashed the dreadful message- HTTP
+>   ERROR 500. That simple warning taunted, probed, and questioned my mind for
+>   hours on end. As I pivoted my binocular gaze from the computer to out the
+>   window, I saw the front yard dimly lit by the drowsy moon. Time for a second
+>   stood still as the crickets chirped and the trees swayed in the cool summer
+>   breeze. Closing my eyes for that second of silence made me realize how tired
+>   I really was. A beeping, piercing, and dinging sound focused my gaze back to
+>   the computer. Still flashing was that error reminding me that I had a long
+>   night ahead.
+>
+>   For the past two weeks I had been working on an employee management system
+>   for a store. This web based system was to keep track of employee hours for
+>   payroll. The project was near complete; however, there was a few bugs left
+>   to fix. The most annoying of which was password verification for the
+>   webform. Now nearing the end of the development cycle, the project was
+>   suppose to go live tomorrow.
+>
+>   Debugging a project is often a daunting task for programmers. Simply finding
+>   an error is like finding a misspelled word in the dictionary. Correcting the
+>   misspelling may be easy but finding that word is another story. What I love
+>   about programming is that the program does exactly what I tell it to do. If
+>   it makes a mistake it’s because I told it to, not because it feels tired, or
+>   doesn't like me. Every bug, error, and glitch I unintentionally create.
+>   These bugs eventually come out to the surface like a fish gasping for air.
+>   An error is never just a mistake. It represents something much larger- an
+>   error in my way of thinking. Debugging is a process that enables me to
+>   further understand the program and crush the bug like the parasite it is.
+>
+>   Sitting back in my chair in deep thought I resumed the process of scanning,
+>   poking, and probing my code for any source of the error. For the past hour I
+>   narrowed the source of the error to ten lines of dubious code. Pondering
+>   these lines of code I added an echo statement which allows me to see the
+>   inner workings of the code. The error became as clear as day, the password
+>   was not getting hashed: a feature that adds security to password storage.
+>   Excitedly I typed a few lines of code to fix this problem. Then swiftly I
+>   pressed execute, only to my disappointment to receive a different error
+>   code. Eyes glazed over, I realized my mistake. In the process of debugging I
+>   left a block of code commented out.
+>
+>   On a dim screen in the corner of my room beamed the message- Currently
+>   Working.
+>
+>");  
+>}