<p>Im a freshman at Texas A&M applying for a continuing Aggie scholarship. The topic is:</p>
<p>"Many students expand their view of the world during their time in college. Such growth often results from encounters between students who have lived different cultural, economic, or academic experiences. With your future growth in mind, describe a potential classmate that you believe you could learn from either within or outside a formal classroom environment. "</p>
<p>I wrote one on this exact topic last year as an incoming freshman, but Ive since heard that I and many others approached it wrong. I started talking about the value of diversity, then described a not so well known indian tribe and said id like to have one of its members as a classmate so i could broaden my world view. Ive heard since that this essay isnt asking you to create an imaginary friend, but is asking you to describe what you want to improve about yourself. can anyone confirm or deny this?</p>
<p>I interpreted it just as you did. "Describe a potential classmate".
I think it's all in the essay content and writing style anyway. Not like the SAT. It won't be Optiscanned and assigned a numerical grade.</p>
<p>Like most college essays, the point of this essay is to reveal something about yourself that the rest of your application doesn't. It's more of an indirect "tell me more about you" question. How you do that is up to you. I hate Essay B.</p>
<p>I am not quite sure if there is a correct approach to this. My REALLY smart friend wrote hers about her "split personality" sort of. Like the personality in her that never comes out. It was a really good essay, just kind weird.</p>
<p>I hated Essay B, too. I wrote some stuff about how I was the product of my genes and my upbringing, and that someone else might have different traits because they've experienced different things and how I might could learn from them. But yeah, I thought it was a weird topic.</p>
<p>This essay was the second worse I had to write, second only to Tufts' "Who are you?" essay. Having a second essay isn't overly inconvenient, but they should really work on their topics. Being as it goes to monstrous schools like UT where you have like 50,000 kids applying.. I imagine it gets annoying reading thousands upon thousands of essays that say "This is what I'm like, I want to meet someone the opposite of this.. because uhh that's what I think you want me to say."</p>
<p>I realized after I wrote that essay that any ethic person who grew up in the US wrote about the same damn thing I did. "I want to meet somebody from the country that I have origins from, and learn about the culture."</p>
<p>haha at first, I didn't like the topic.
But after I wrote it, I was very satisfied with the essay.
Plus, I spent the least time on it because I cared so little about it.</p>
<p>I wrote about a student from a far away land who loved to cook. I learned how to cook dishes with ingredients previously unknown to me. It sounds much beter in essay form but I couldn't think of anything else.</p>
<p>I thought my topic B essay was pretty darn good. Sat down and took about an hour to write it, made no corrections and just submitted haha. I wrote about a student who was.. the complete opposite of me. Creative, i know ;)</p>