I'm in somewhere in the vicinity of my 7th year at Purdue University. I started in Mechanical Engineering, made a brief foray at Electrical Engineering before realizing that I hate Laplace and all things involved with it, and Fourier is pretty close to Laplace, so equally hated. Then I changed to CS, added Psychology for a double major, and tossed in a Philosophy minor for kicks. Then I switched to a part-time student, because I'm working to pay for myself, and couldn't carry a full time job and a full time CS courseload.

Yep. It's been a long road. And it's still stretched out before me a bit.

Back to the question on the first page: The two biggest concerns I'd say for writing college application essays is this: Be interesting. High schoolers all write exactly the same damned essays, all full of boring minutae and self-aggrandizement, dull answers to dull questions. The way to make yourself stand out above the crowd in that field is to write an essay that's actually interesting to read. Something that, if you handed it to a stranger on the street, they might actually read to the end. But most schools (almost all publicly owned universities) are more concerned with your GPA, test scores, and how deep your high school education was than the entry essays.

And yeah ... alcohol loses the magical attraction a bit, after you realize that it's no big deal to just head out and pick up a fifth of something.