feedback on my essay??? i know close to nothing about college essays or applying to colleges… i don’t know if this is a good topic. i’m not yet applying anywhere so this is just a first draft. i’ll probably write a couple more with different topics.

If humanity were an ocean, I think I would be a lighthouse. I have spent much of my life standing at its edge, watching people move through the waves around me, searching for patterns in their movements that I could not always understand instinctively. As an undiagnosed autistic child, I often felt as though everyone else had been given a map to navigating the world that I had somehow missed. So I watched. I studied expressions, conversations, friendships, gestures, and silences, piecing together the invisible rules of what was considered “normal.” What began as a way to navigate a world that often felt unfamiliar gradually became something more: a genuine fascination with the people I was watching. I wanted to understand not only how people behaved, but why. Eventually, that curiosity would lead me to wonder how much could be learned about humanity from those who had lived long before me.

At first, watching people was less about curiosity and more about learning how to belong. I found myself studying the smallest details: when someone laughed, how long they held eye contact, when it was appropriate to speak, or how their expression changed depending on who they were with. I treated these observations like pieces of a puzzle, comparing them to my own behavior and trying to determine what I was doing differently. Without realizing it, I had become intensely aware of the people around me. I noticed things others might overlook.

That curiosity followed me beyond the boundaries of my own experiences. I began to wonder what shaped people into who they were: why they formed certain relationships, held particular beliefs, preserved traditions, or left certain things behind. I became fascinated by the idea that a person’s life could be understood through the traces they leave behind, even when they are no longer there to explain themselves. The more I learned, the more I realized that my instinct to observe was not simply a way of navigating the present—it was a way of asking questions about humanity itself. If I could learn so much from watching the people around me, I wondered what I could learn from people who had lived hundreds or thousands of years ago. That question was what first drew me toward archaeology.

Looking back, I no longer see my tendency to observe as something that separated me from the world. Instead, it became the lens through which I learned to understand it. What began as watching people for clues about how to fit in grew into a genuine curiosity about their lives, their choices, and the worlds they create. Archaeology gives me the opportunity to carry that curiosity beyond the present and use it to illuminate lives that have been hidden by time. Like a lighthouse, I know I will never be able to illuminate the entire ocean at once. But I can keep turning my light toward the unknown, noticing what others might overlook and searching for the stories hidden within it. I do not want to simply study the remains of humanity; I want to understand the people behind them.