My Favorite Collection by Grace

My Favorite Collection by Grace - November 2018 Scholarship Essay

The idea of collections has always fascinated me. My mother used to have a collection of stamps. My sister has a collection of foreign currency. Me, I have a few different collections: I have shelves full of notebooks. I keep a cup of fortune cookie fortunes by my bedside. But most of all, I collect ideas.
My ideas dangle from Post Its on my wall and lounge in notebooks on my shelf. They stick between pages and hide in my schoolwork. Though I never made a conscious effort to start collecting ideas--they've just started to accrue. I have notebooks from when I was a kid with ideas for everything from learning to do a back handspring to fixing the educational system. Of course, the ideas got more complex as I got older, but the same eclecticism remained. My bedroom is now overflowing with idea detritus: exploited worksheets sprawled across my desk, checklists hanging from my walls, stacks of books sitting on my side table and floor. Sometimes interesting, mostly unhelpful, always bizarre, ideas flow from corners and cracks in the floorboards. For the most part, they remain untouched after creation, settling gently with the dust. Occasionally, however, I’ll come up with something that doesn’t immediately fizzle out.
Thus, for my senior quote, I chose a quote that my sixth grade teachers actually recommended for me. At the end of the year, my sixth grade class had a ceremony where we got a certificate of completion for the sixth grade, as well as a quote that the teachers felt best described us. Mine was a quote by scientist and activist Linus Pauling that read, “The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.”
I can only hope this is true.