A Big Jar Of Mustard

This piece was written in 2015 as an admissions essay for the University of Chicago 2016 fall semester. The essay as well as my application allotted me waitlist status.

Have you ever walked through the aisles of a warehouse store like Costco or Sam’s Club and wondered who would buy a jar of mustard a foot and a half tall? We’ve bought it, but it didn’t stop us from wondering about other things, like absurd eating contests, impulse buys, excess, unimagined uses for mustard, storage, preservatives, notions of bigness…and dozens of other ideas both silly and serious. Write an essay somehow inspired by super-huge mustard.

— Based on a suggestion by Katherine Gold of Cherry Hill High School East, Cherry Hill, NJ (2004–2005)

I saw this question and asked, “What the heck does a jar mustard have to do with applying to college?” The randomness was a good break from the traditional grind of writing, so I decided to give it a go. That choice would leave me wondering why I thought this was a good idea in the first place. After about a week I thought I would give up and use another prompt, but then I realized that I was going to write an essay about mustard. I was not going to give up just because I thought it was possibly the hardest topic to write about. You see, I was thinking about the mustard wrong the whole time.

The idea struck
Very big jar of mustard
Opportunity

There are no limits to what you can do with a big jar of mustard, so there should be no limit in what I can write about. If I had a jar of mustard this large, I would try it on everything including pizza, ice cream, salad, and whatever else you can name. Some of these would be definite failures, but that is no loss, for I still have a lot of mustard left. What if there was a use of mustard that turned out grandiose, but no one had thought to try it? No idea should ever go untested; Ideas are not meant to die.

This has nothing to do with mustard. I do not think I will be putting mustard on ice cream or in my coffee anytime soon. I will, however, given the opportunity, try new combinations of technologies and techniques. I think there is a side of science that looks like a man putting mustard on his pizza. Sometimes in science we do not know where to start, so we mix whatever we can get our hands on and record the results. Sometimes we make a discovery, whether it be a result we had hoped for or one we did not expect. It is important to have many opportunities because failure is inevitable. With limited opportunity comes the limited chance of success. Failures should be called small successes because they eliminate wrong answers. Once enough wrong answers are eliminated, the correct answer is more apparent.

Another important detail about a large jar is that it is meant to be shared. In a more literal sense, large opportunities do not work well when only one person takes advantage of them. If the average person bought a jar of mustard this large, it would spoil before they were able to take full advantage of it. If given the opportunity to start something large, do not ever enter alone. You can not climb Mount Everest by yourself as easily as you can with a little assistance. Also, sometimes we reach our goals without needing all we were given. It becomes our responsibility to give back. Others were not as fortunate as us, and we would not have been either if it were not for someone else sharing their surplus. Never be afraid to collaborate; never be afraid to share your mustard.

Where is a giant jar of mustard available? As far as I can tell, only in America. That is not a coincidence. Everything is big in America, including “the dream.” It is no wonder that people travel from all over the world to America for its opportunities. A consequence of everything being large is that the risk and failure also inflate to high levels. Imagine that you just bought a bad batch of mustard, now you have a huge jar of it. You have to give up a lot of mustard, or in the real world, a lot of money. You may be upset, but so is every other person who bought that mustard. High risk gives the opportunity for high reward, low risk yields lower reward. You will not fight the next disease by only playing it safe, but you may also lose to it if you fear taking risks. Finding a balance is key.

The topic of this essay was a jar of mustard itself. I had absolutely no clue what I was going to write about this insane theme. I started to throw some ideas on my canvas. I had no idea what I was expecting, but I found interesting results. If I felt that this was a poor measure of my ability, I would write it again, avoiding all the mistakes I had made previously. I did write this alone, but I was sure to bounce ideas off my friends also dealing with writer’s block. I think it was a very risky decision to choose the hardest prompt in my mind. The results are either spectacular or disastrous. The point is, I was given an opportunity and I gave it my everything.