Aloha, Emma
This is a strong draft, and I want to say that up front before I give you the honest notes. The story is real, the failure is specific and yours, and the middle of this essay is doing exactly what Prompt 2 asks: a setback, its actual cost, and what it changed in how you think. "I had removed the shoulder tap" is the best sentence in the piece. "The issue was thin and I have not reread it" is the second best. Those two lines carry more self-awareness than most whole essays I read.
Now the notes, in order of importance.
The opening sentence is working against you. "Every institution, I have come to believe, is a bridge between the people who built it and the people who will inherit it." That is a thesis for a history paper, not the first line of your story. It is the most scrutinized sentence in your whole application, and right now it is abstract, a little grand, and the bridge metaphor never comes back after "I nearly dropped it in the river." Your essay really starts at "Last spring I tried to rebuild one," and honestly it might start even later, with Quill itself. Two options: cut the first sentence entirely and see if the second one can stand alone, or keep the bridge but make it pay off somewhere in the back half. A metaphor you use once in line one and never again reads like decoration. What made you reach for the bridge image? If there is a real answer, that answer might belong in the essay. If not, cut it.
The last sentence is the weakest thing here, and it is very fixable. "Those lessons have made me a better editor, a better teammate, and I think a better person, and they are lessons I will carry with me into college and beyond." That is the sentence every admissions reader has seen ten thousand times, and it is beneath the essay above it. You already have your real ending: "good intentions are not the same as good design" and the fairness versus access distinction. That is a genuinely sharp idea, the kind of thing your narrative says you live for, arguing one line until it sits right. Trust it. Cut the "college and beyond" sentence and you also free up about twenty-five words, which brings me to the next point.
You have a little room, and there is one place to spend it. You are around forty words under the limit, plus whatever you save cutting that last sentence. The moment doing the least showing is "When I finally started asking people why they had not submitted." You summarize those conversations in one sentence. Give me one of them. One actual person, one actual answer in the hallway. That is the scene where you learn the thing, and right now it happens offstage. Even two sentences of a real exchange would make the turn land harder.
One fact-check. You wrote "from a school of about nine hundred." Your school's whole enrollment is a good deal smaller than that, and the admissions reader will have your school profile sitting right next to your essay. Make sure that number is right, because a mismatch there is the kind of small thing that dents a reader's trust in everything else.
One smaller thought, take it or leave it. The two senior editors who voted against you are load-bearing at the end, when you admit they were right about how the magazine actually worked. They stay anonymous the whole way through. You do not need names, but one concrete detail about their argument, an actual phrase one of them used, would make your admission that you were "too certain to hear it" feel earned rather than stated.
On prompt fit: no worries here. This genuinely answers Prompt 2. It also brushes against Prompt 3, since you challenged how Quill worked, but the failure and recovery are the spine of the piece, so stay where you are.
The shape of this essay is right. The middle needs almost nothing. Fix the first sentence, fix the last one, stage one real conversation, verify that number, and you will be very close. Send me the next pass when you have it, and tell me what you decide about the bridge.