2008 Common Reading Program
The 2008 Essay Contest is open to first-year, transfer, and returning undergraduate Case students. Essays should be approximately 1,000 words and submitted to Educational Services for Students (ESS), 470 Sears Building. Essays also may be faxed to 216.368.8826 or e-mailed to essinfo@case.edu.
The deadline for all submissions is Wednesday, August 6. Please review our Essay Contest Rules prior to submission.
First-year student winners will be announced at the Share the Vision program in Severance Hall on Friday, August 22, and will receive University Bookstore gift certificates of $300 sponsored by the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities. Returning and transfer student winners will be announced at the University Convocation on Thursday, August 28, and winners will receive $300 gift certificates. All winners will have the opportunity to meet with the author David Quammen.
2008 Essay Contest for First-Year Students
First-year students may select either of the following prompts:
1. David Quammen remarks that when Charles Darwin returned home from his voyage on the Beagle in 1836, he "didn’t yet recognize the awful scope of the idea that was growing inside him." By spring 1838, however, Darwin's notebooks indicate that he had grasped the full implications of his emerging theory:
Once you grant that species 'may pass into one another,' then the 'whole fabric totters and falls.' The fabric was natural theology. For him it had fallen. Behind where that drapery had hung, Darwin saw the reality of evolution. It wasn’t just a matter of mockingbirds, rabbits, and skinks. It was the whole natural world (37).
In your essay, discuss an idea that, at one time or another, grew inside you and led to a major change in your outlook or your belief system. Trace the development of that idea, and describe its impact on your life, as precisely as you can.
2. In an early chapter of The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, David Quammen compares Darwin to a bird and the idea of natural selection to an egg that was gestating inside him:
Ovulation had occurred. Fertilization had occurred. Now came growth, from the microscopic scale of a single ovum to . . . well, to whatever size it would reach before laying (57).
According to Quammen, Darwin’s "egg" reached a prodigious size because he was reluctant to release it into the world. In your essay, describe an idea or personal insight that you hesitate (or have hesitated) to share with other people. Describe the "pressures and implications" (37) that account for your reluctance, and explain how you have dealt with them.
2008 Essay Contest for Returning and Transfer Students
Returning and transfer students must repond to the following prompt:
In the introduction to The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, David Quammen writes: "Everyone knows something about Darwin, what he did, what he said, and the thing that most people think they know is: He concocted 'the theory of evolution.' This isn't quite wrong, just confused and imprecise, but it misses those points about Darwin's work that are most profoundly original, and dangerous, and thrilling" (11). In your essay, discuss two or three related aspects of Darwin's life or thought that aren't common knowledge but that Quammen brings to light in his book. You are especially welcome to discuss ideas and themes that you didn't know much about before you read the biography.