Hi everyone, I’m a current high school senior. I have written two college essays and I can’t decide which one I should continue working on. I will not display them here for fear of plagiarism, but let me summarize:
I first wrote an essay about an experience I had. In 8th grade, I helped tutor a friend over the summer for a placement exam, and he got into a selective HS as a result. I then mentioned how that inspired me to tutor my younger cousins over the following summers, and how I recently signed up to be a CS tutor at my school.
The cons of this essay are:
- I feel it's kind of cheesy/cliche. I remembered advice not to write things like "i went on this service trip and i helped people and i learned a lot:, and this reminds me of that.
- Me tutoring my friend/my younger cousins wasn't on the record. Colleges might think I'm lying, and view CS tutoring (which I just joined this senior year, and is on the record) as a lame cover-up attempt.
- I really like tutoring, but I don't think I want to pursue being a teacher. My true passion lies in math/CS, but this essay doesn't emphasize that.
Then, I decided to read some sample college essays from students admitted to a selective college. I noticed that their essays seemed different than mine: they talked about their passions and how they’re planning to do something awesome with them, or about touching childhood memories they had that personified them a lot.
I decided to write an essay on a completely new topic: my passion for artificial intelligence. I started off with a specific problem I had in my life (and I characterized myself in describing this problem), and I followed with how I found an app which uses AI to solve that problem. I described how I’m really interested in using AI to solve real-world problems, and an idea I had for an app that uses AI to do so. Finally, I described how AI was a bit of enigma to me in childhood, and how that has affected my view as I study how AI works in the present.
The cons of this essay are:
- Colleges can't verify that I'm actually interested in AI. I haven't been a part of any extracurriculars that would showcase this interest.
- It doesn't make much mention of other people; it doesn't show where I am in relation to the rest of the world.
- It's kind of all over the place; my sister said it's like 3 different topics in one essay, and I need to focus on one topic.
- Although I mentioned how I would build an app that uses AI, I don't feel like I have a momentous, really interesting problem I would like to tackle with AI, yet. I just find AI interesting because it combines math and science; I need to study it more in college before I know exactly what I'll do with it.
After those long explanations, which college essay do you think I should choose and continue to refine on?