<p>I was reading The Common App's essay prompts today and thought of a (potentially) creative topic for this prompt:</p>
<p>Discuss some issue of personal, local, national, or international concern and its importance to you. </p>
<p>I would like to go into the field of computer science, so I feel as though the topic of hacking is relevant and of utmost important nowadays (lots of major corporations have been hacked lately (ex. Sony)).</p>
<p>If executed properly, could this topic make for an interesting essay, or is it a commonly used topic and/or uninteresting? </p>
<p>Thanks for any input.</p>
<p>I guess a lot of people would be opting for the same topic this year with PSN, Sega and others getting hacked recently. So I guess if you do go for it then you would have to come up with a different perspective about the topic if you want your essay to stand out</p>
<p>Actually, I think hacking would be a very unique topic. Most college applicants probably don’t follow tech news, so I can’t imagine “a lot of people” using the same topic. I say go for it.</p>
<p>As long as you don’t make your essay sound silly and “hackerzzzzzz!!!”, then ya I’d say it’s a pretty unique topic. If you wanna go to a damn prestigious school, then you gotta go Steve Jobs on this essay ***** rather than some stupid gamer loser who likes the idea of computer hacking. LOL</p>
<p>Talk about how you pulled off all of those successful SQL injections and DDOS attacks.</p>
<p>“Talk about how you pulled off all of those successful SQL injections and DDOS attacks.”</p>
<p>haha. He sould talk about how he likes to hack. Now that I think about it I’m sure that’ll intimidate the school. X)</p>
<p>Yeah, in no way do I support hacking or actually do it.</p>
<p>That’s the tightrope you’d have to walk. I can think of some exciting essays here. Think of the movie “The Italian Job” which shows Charlese Theron cracking a safe in the dark… then the lights come on and she’s “caught.” But not really… she was cracking it for the safe’s manufacturers, exposing vulnerabilities.</p>
<p>With hacking, it takes one to really understand how these things work and how hackers think. But describing that, doesn’t that make you look like a hacker?</p>
<p>I worked in the company that invented UNIX way back when and had a brilliant employee who tried to convince everyone in company of the security vulnerabilities of being logged in as root and using the remote login capabilities to get into another machine (again, way back when). No one would listen to him. So one night he hacked into many many computers in the company and left a screen message which basically said "Now do you believe me? (Not really that message, but that was the effect.) It was a strange reaction - half the company wanted this guy for their organizations. The other half were outraged and wanted him fired IMMEDIATELY.</p>
<p>So the topic can be great, but be careful.</p>
<p>^— btw, we kept him as an employee, but I could never shake the feeling that he could - if he wanted - get into the payroll system and give himself a raise. LOL</p>