Today I got off to great start on one of my Columbia essays, only to find I was having even greater difficulty in finishing it up. Right now, I have decided that bad first drafts are better than no first drafts so I have pushed through and completed the draft, 14 words over and pretty weak at the end.

I am finding that there is a very high degree of creativity required in writing these essays. For many of them, the topics are open enough that you have to really think about how you want to answer them, and then you have to construct a story and relate it to your purpose (LET ME IN!!!). All in all, this can be very challenging.

One thing that I have started doing is reading a lot to stimulate my ideas. I have borrowed books from the library on leadership, I am reading Freakonomics, and I’m doing a whole lot of surfing on the internet, on a variety of topics. 90% of this content will never find its way into any of my essays, but I just need to keep my brain going.

I realized today that I had written a draft of one of the Columbia essays a couple weeks ago, so I’m back on track now with today’s draft completed. Tomorrow I will have a run at the “entrepreneurial” essay - I suppose that I need to be especially creative for that one! :)