Tom Lehrer got into Harvard in 1943 at age 15, and it is said that the following poem he wrote (at that age or even earlier) was his admission “essay”. The Loomis Alumni Bulletin issue of autumn 1943 (Loomis was the prep school he went to) said of the poem:
Dissertation on Education
Education is a splendid institution,
A most important social contribution,
Which has brought about my mental destitution
By its own peculiar type of persecution.
For I try to absorb
In the midst of an orb
Of frantic instructors’ injunctions
The name of the Fates
And the forty-eight states
And the trigonometrical functions,
The figures of speech
(With the uses of each)
And the chemical symbol for lead,
The depth of the ocean,
Molecular motion,
The names of the bones in the head,
The plot of Macbeth
And Romeo’s death
And the history of the Greek drama,
Construction of graphs
And the musical staffs
And the routes of Cortez and da Gama,
The name of the Pope,
The inventor of soap,
And the oldest American college–
The use of conceits,
The poems of Keats,
And other poetical knowledge.
I’m beginning to feel
I don’t care a great deal
For the reign of the Emperor Nero,
The poems of Burns,
What the President earns,
And the value of absolute zero,
The length of a meter,
The size of a liter,
The cause of inflation and failure,
The veins and the nerves,
Geometrical curves,
And the distance from here to Australia,
Reproduction of germs,
Biological terms,
And when a pronoun is disjunctive,
The making of cheese,
The cause of disease,
And the use of the present subjunctive.
I wish that there weren’t
Electrical current,
Such places as Rome and Cathay,
And such people as Watt
And Sir Walter Scott
And Edna St. Vincent Millay.
I don’t like very much
To learn customs and such
Of people like Tibetan lamas,
And I’d like to put curbs
On irregular verbs
And the various uses for commas,
International pacts
All historical facts,
Like the dates of Columbus and Croesus,
Bunker Hill, Saratoga,
And Ticonderoga,
The War of the Peloponnesus.
But although I detest
Learning poems and the rest
Of the things one must know to have “culture,”
While each of my teachers
Makes speeches like preachers
And preys on my faults like a vulture,
I will leave movie thrillers
And watch caterpillars
Get born and pupated and larva’ed,
And I’ll work like a slave
And always behave
And maybe I’ll get into Harvard…