<p>@AwesomeToad</p>
<p>How’s your Early Action results? The UChicago result may give insight to your essays quality, while the MIT result may give insight to whether they think you are inquisitive, curious, innovative etc.</p>
<p>It’s good to know that you have other ECs from computer/science/maths. I’m very relived to hear that. A key term admissions use is “lopsided”, which can be detrimental to a highly successful applicant’s chances, especially if you’re Asian. Be sure to show that you’re not lopsided.</p>
<p>You’re right about a lot of universities saying that they are after individual specialists. That means you must be unique. You can show that you’re unique through a variety of ways, but one of the easiest is to pick up an interesting hobby that not a lot of others have. It’s much harder to express it through essays. Right now, your main ECs may not be that unique, and they fall into the generic category. An easy way to fix this is to specify your ECs by giving them specific names. For example, name the programming competition. This is a very effective method to make you sound different.</p>