18-year-old high school student Abigail Mack from Massachusetts became a star of social networks, posting on the Internet her essay for admission to higher education.
The work not only helped her with admission to the prestigious Harvard University on unique terms (in 2021 there was announced the highest passing score in 108 years and the minimum number of places in 70 years - 1868 out of more than 57 thousand applicants, that is, no more than 3.8%) - the girl became famous. Published on TikTok, the work with an excellent assessment of the educational institution became a viral video: only the first part was viewed by one and a half million people.
The theme of the work is the letter S, which is a plural marker. We are talking about parents, or rather, about the difference between full and single-parent families.
Abigail's mother died of cancer. The letter is a vivid example of the epistolary genre: it tells the story of a teenager with brightness, accuracy of images and amazing frankness, who suffered the most serious loss in his life and in the struggle to overcome the consequences.
"I used to have two parents, and now I have only one. Meanwhile, the letter S in the word parents (parents) is not going anywhere,"the girl writes in a paragraph about the death of her mother from cancer. "I hate that letter,"dots the first paragraph. - "Out of 165,000 words with this letter, I work with only one, because declaring war on all such words is ridiculous. On the other hand, one incident changed my life 100%, it is related to S - and I am now alone, and the letter S from the word "parents" is not going anywhere. "
The video unfunny spins the story on the dotted line. Abigail is originally from Brockton, Massachusetts. She wrote an essay on family, and the automatic spelling, punctuation, and grammar check site Grammarley gave out when checking that the singular version of the word "parents" she used was incorrect. And then there is the argument that the world is cruel, unjust and not adapted for this special occasion.
Mack spent her days reading books, trying to distract herself from her mother's death, but invariably returned to the topic, unable to make up for the loss. The text pays great attention to the new pursuits that have become the subject of Abigail's interest – primarily theatre, academia and politics: "I stopped running away and hiding from the single S and set about chasing S double passions."
Passion gave her purpose – and opportunity. In the shortest possible time, Harvard University, Notre Dame (where the girl's parents studied), Northwestern University in Chicago and Darmouth College responded to the essay. And according to BuzzFeed, videos in TikTok were viewed and brought to the favorites of a total of 19 million people, more than 30,000 shot response videos, launching a kind of challenge.
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She grew up in a creative environment: her mother opened a dance studio, which is now run by her father, who was previously engaged in playing the piano, so a significant part of Mack's life was the theater.
But hobbies and interests do not end there - the political activity of an eighteen-year-old teenager has become a new hobby. The fuse was the demonstrations in the framework of the BLM campaign: they say, after that, it was impossible to stay away. I walked around with a poster, and it went: a campaign for the re-election of Senate member Edward Markey, and then videos teaching volunteers how to call banking institutions during the election of Joe Biden as President of the United States.
