Thank you all for reading and voting!
We had over 1,000 votes for our finalists, but the masses have spoken.
Our winner:
Isaac Soldz (325 votes)
Second place:
Molly Hillis (184 votes)
Third place:
Congratulations!
We’ll be contacting you soon with the details about picking up your bookstore certificates.
Hello–
We read all 1,589 submissions and came up with ten finalists for your consideration.
Now you get to help us decide the winners!
Keep scrolling down to see our ten finalists.
After you have read each of the ten essays below, vote once for your favorite essay (using the “poll” feature above).
We’ll announce the winners on the last day of classes December 1oth.
(Scroll down to see our contest judges as well.)
Prizes:
1st Place: $250 Bookstore Gift Certificate
2nd Place: $150 Bookstore Gift Certificate
3rd Place: $100 Bookstore Gift Certificate
Rachel Wicks
When Abbie Conant auditioned for the orchestra in Germany, she was considered to be the best of the best, until the screen went down and she was revealed to be a woman.
When I was accepted in to my first job at a furniture delivery company, I was seen as a valuable asset to the team, until the first shipment of chairs came and everyone remembered that “girls were weak”.
A delivery truck had just backed into the parking lot, carrying a shipment of 85 task chairs, each one nestled inside cardboard boxes taller than the average human. My boss told me that I would be unloading the truck and handing the boxes over to the guys on the ground, so I hoisted myself inside the truck and starting pushing one of the boxes out. However, halfway to the edge of the truck, one of my male coworkers took the box out of my hands and said, with a smile, “It’s alright. I got this.”
I stood there. I knew I had just experienced a tiny sliver of everyday sexism, but I also knew that my coworker was just being nice. I wanted to be appreciative, but I was hurt. I might be a woman but I was not a weakling. But instead of bothering to notice that I was tall, strong, and in the employment of other furniture movers, my coworker only “listened with his eyes” and saw I was a woman.
To “listen with your eyes”, according to Malcolm Gladwell, is to make an assumption based on bias, ignoring any and all facts that contribute to disprove those prejudices. Abbie Conant played her instrument beautifully but was rejected for being a woman. I was handling the furniture boxes well on my own, but was seen as automatically incompetent for the same reason.
So when Gladwell began discussing the phenomenon of “listening with your eyes”, it was nothing new to me. The idea had simply been given a name, but an accurate one. It leads to the idea that maybe, just maybe, is we “closed our eyes” more often, we’d see so much more.
Isaac Soldz
SCREEEEEECH. In one quick motion, the bus pulls to a stop and the doors swing open. It was very late and I was the only one on the bus except an old drunk man who sat hunched over, wallowing in self-pity. “Hey, kid”. I open my eyes, blinking with bewilderment. The bus driver stares at me angrily. He was an overweight man; middle-aged, unshaven, smelled awful, and was sweating profusely. “Hey, kid” I hear again. “Sorry” I mutter. I stumble off the bus and begin to make my way up the street. The streetlights flicker on and off, but it is no matter for the moon is my shepherd. I begin to toss my keys in my hands. Amidst all the jingles, I hear a noise. “It’s nothing,” I say to myself as I start to swing my keys around my finger. I turn the corner while the noise behind me continues to crescendo. I dodge the many trashcans that line the sidewalks when, out of the corner of my eye, I notice a dark figure. A flurry of thoughts darts through my brain. My body stops walking but my heart races on. I clench my keys tightly in a fist. And then…
Those half-second decisions determine the outcome of situations. Do I stand my ground, or do I take off running? Decisions like these are known by psychologists as “thin slicing” which, as Malcolm Gladwell defines in his critically acclaimed book Blink, is “the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience (23).” Everyone encounters these decisions during their lives, most commonly in that gut feeling that tells you what to do. But, as Gladwell argues, if one is able to hone that skill, and maximize its potential they can become all the more successful. But, did I make the right decision?
The dark figure approached me. “Do you know when the last bus is?” he asks. I let out a deep sigh of relief. “1 o’clock”.
Grace Moulton
The Call
“Did they know they knew? Not at all. But they knew” Malcolm Gladwell writes in his book, Blink. He is referring to a story centered on the concept of thin slicing. Thin slicing is the ability of one to subconsciously mark what is important, in an extremely short amount of time. Everyone does it, no one is conscious of it. This is my story.
Late into my senior year, I pulled into my driveway after a long, somewhat excruciating, day of finals. I walked in the door, kicked off my flip-flops and plopped myself down right in front of the TV. A typical Tuesday afternoon. Everything felt completely normal until I heard that familiar buzzing; I looked down at my ringing phone and felt my stomach turn. However, I did not know why. It was just Aimee, the mother of the two boys in which I baby-sat. I picked up the phone and answered. Immediately I could discern in her voice that something was just not right. She proceeded to ask me if I remembered that I was supposed to get Adam off the bus that day. Then I remembered. I could not believe it, after three years of babysitting, I forgot. I apologized, and apologized, and then apologized some more. I hung up the phone and burst into tears.
How did I know that I had done something wrong, without even knowing I did? Sounds confusing but I promise you it is not. I thin sliced. My unconscious mind knew something was wrong, meanwhile my conscious mind did not. “Snap judgments and rapid cognition take place behind a locked door” (Gladwell, 51). This is exactly what happened, rapid cognition occurred however, I did not consciously recognize it.
Our unconscious is a beautifully intriguing concept, however, we most likely will never know all there is to it. Just like thin slicing “…it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that – sometimes – we’re better off that way” (52).
Works Cited: Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking. New York: Little, Brown and, 2005. Print.
Shawn Luz
My earliest recollection of them is from the fifth grade. I found myself in an all too familiar situation slouched over my desk in music class watching those orderly, little hands on the clock slowly tick away. I was desperately hoping that they would convince the bell to ring before I had to listen to another song that I wouldn’t like. My hopes were crushed shortly after. A few ticks later, the teacher walked over to the dusty blackboard and picked up a tiny piece of white chalk. I couldn’t help but sigh as I watched her clumsily scrawl “The Beatles” on the board. I didn’t know much about the Beatles except that they were considered a hugely successful boy band. Unfortunately, that was enough to make me hate them. Seeing a picture of the fab four solidified my convictions; supported by swarms of teenage girls who could care less about music, the Beatles were posers. My head fell to my hands as the CD tray swished into the stereo. I’ll never forget the first time I listened to the most famous band in the world. It almost hurts to say that I once hated them.
“Yellow Submarine” blared out across the classroom as I began to fight the urge to tap my feet. The subconscious wall I had set up was trying to prevent me from enjoying the music. It began to crumble. Negative images of the goody two shoes boy band I had imagined were slowly losing out to the musical notes that danced into my ears. By the time I had listened to “Yesterday” that wall was reduced to debris.
Clearly, it was wrong for me to convince myself that I didn’t like The Beatles before hearing their music, much like how “without a screen, Abbie Conant would have been dismissed without playing a note” (Gladwell 252). As Gladwell points out, I allowed myself to “listen with my eyes” and not my ears; letting irrelevant preconceptions interfere with what truly mattered. For the first time in music class, I was sad to finally hear that bell ring.
Works Cited: Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking. New York: Little, Brown and, 2005. Print.
