Since the beginning of time, editors at The Nassau Weekly have taken their pens to each other’s Common Application Essays. And yes, The Nassau Weekly has been around since the beginning of time. Here, in the billionth incarnation of this segment since the great Mother Nature birthed our tiny planet into its tiny and insignificant existence, Managing Editors Joshua Leifer and Rachel Stone compete in the nearly timeless contest: who was the most insufferably pretentious college applicant? This is an ancient ritual. This is Peer Review.

Why eviscerate each other’s college application essays in public, you might ask? The answer is simple: nothing proved as satisfactory a measure of “getting here” as the Common Application. Also, FERPA did not exist at the beginning of time. And in truth, if we weren’t such lazy shits, we would’ve gone and FERPA’d ourselves to find out what the hired hands in the admissions office thought about our cringe-worthy attempts to distinguish ourselves within a mass of similarly indistinguishable people. But instead, we emailed our mothers to scan our essays so that we could do this. Now, like our foremothers and forefathers before us, we don the armor of ancient Nass warriors and face off roman coliseum of public opinion tearing apart each other’s rhetoric in the name of Good Clean Fun.

There is a chance that if you are reading this, you are what we call, here in this provincial outpost known as Princeton, a “prefrosh.” This is intentional. Peer Review is a didactic exercise designed to show that even if you are a straight-up fucking weirdo who plays dress-up as a nineteenth century anarchist or imagines going on dates with grimy tubercular poets, you can still find a home, and even thrive inside the FitzRandolph gates. And who knows, you just might end up editing The Nassau Weekly.

Rachel peer-edits Josh:

Josh peer-edits Rachel: