Rate my common app essay as brutal brown admissions officer reading im using topic of your choice: The bell rings. Chairs scrape. Backpacks zip. The hallway floods. Someone cuts in front of me. Another bumps into me. My phone buzzes. It is a Life360 screenshot from my dad. 1.0 miles per hour. I laugh before I can stop myself, then glance around to see if anyone else noticed. My friends are already halfway down the hall, and I am still passing the door next to mine. "Yo hurry up, Ronak." Four minutes until the bell. Nobody is late. Some nights after robotics, I take the long way home. Sometimes I tell myself I need something from Target. Sometimes I just need an excuse to drive to declutter my mind. I leave the windows down, slow down on purpose, and turn the music off. For once, I'm not thinking about what I need to finish when I get home. The same school that felt packed with people six hours earlier sits dark and empty. I notice the spots on the moon, the empty fields beside the road, and the houses I pass one window at a time. A TV glows downstairs. One upstairs window is still lit. I wonder who's still awake and what they're doing, even though I have almost nothing to go on. Then another car passes, and I realize they know just as little about me. They don't know if I'm heading somewhere important or just trying to make the drive last a little longer. On those drives, slowing down feels easy. At school, it doesn't. If someone's behind me on the stairs, I start wondering if they think I'm holding them up. Even when I move over, I climb faster. When my friends get too far ahead, I debate whether to catch up or let them go. The timed writing begins in English. Keyboards clack around me. Screens fill with words. Mine stays blank while I write my thesis on scratch paper, jot down what each paragraph needs to prove, and match quotes to each point. I look up. The screen beside me already has a paragraph. For a second, I want to start typing just so mine won't look so empty. I know what I'm doing, but the blank screen makes it look like I don't. I look back down at my notes. By the time I finally start typing, I barely pause because I already know where each paragraph is going. The problem was, I started trusting that instinct too much. I got stuck on one factoring problem on my math test and kept convincing myself one more approach would crack it. Factor. Erase. Try again. With ten minutes left, my page was a smudged mess, and I was only half done. I scribbled down partial work for partial credit, finished with no time to check anything. I watched careless mistakes pile up on a test I actually understood. I knew the smarter move was to skip it. What bothered me was leaving while there was still something in my own work I couldn't explain. With a math problem, I can usually keep tracing my work until I find the step that went wrong. I keep wanting the hallway to work the same way. Four minutes is enough. The person behind me isn't making me late. My friends walking faster doesn't change when the bell rings. I know all of that, and my legs still speed up. My dad and I walk the dog most evenings. He used to tell me to hurry up. After enough walks with me trailing behind, he stopped. Now he just waits, usually with his hands behind his back while our dog sniffs the grass. Sometimes he still imitates the way I walk when we get home. I don't speed up anymore. I know he'll still be there when I reach him. He starts walking again, a few steps ahead as usual. For once, I don't mind being behind.