Essay question

[goldenmaster]

Hi CC,

I am applying to Harvard SCEA and I have a question about the essay:

There’s one (rather common) activity I absolutely love to do and in my essay I talk about the activity and the consequences and changes in my life that is due to this activity. I like to think that one can see my enthusiasm.
However, there’s no deeper psychological meaning; that is, I don’t use this specific activity as a symbol for, for example, my love of learning or my compassion. It is just me honestly wirting about something I love to do.

I read that the main function of the essay is to show who you are personally and get the admission office to know you.

Would honestly writing about my favorite activity suffice for that? (Or do i need to forcefully inject some psychology?)

Thanks in advance

[gibby]

It is just me honestly wirting about something I love to do.Would honestly writing about my favorite activity suffice for that? (Or do i need to forcefully inject some psychology?)

It sounds fine, but maybe a bit too general. Writing a college essay is a contrived exercise. I just posted this on another thread, but here it is again

Your goal is to paint a diverse picture of yourself by telling different stories to Admissions. Both The Common Application Personal Statement and Optional Supplemental Essay, in theory, should allow an Admissions Officer to know something about you that they could not glean from looking over your academic record or your extracurricular activities.

For example: my son wrote his personal statement about his baseball coach and the life-lessons he learned from a forty year-old man that never went to college. His supplementary essay was about all the inane things he has learned from watching YouTube videos, including guitar tablature, stick shift driving, ping pong and physics. My daughter’s personal statement was about religion, or rather the lack of growing up without any in her life and wondering what the big deal was. Her supplementary essay was about having stage fright after jealously wanting the center stage spotlight for years and how she over came her fears.

The ‘key’ at least IMHO is to write about a lesson or lessons you learned about yourself from whatever topic you choose to write about. And it should be something so specific that only YOU could write about it!

You can write a wonderful essay about any topic. You can also write a terrible essay about the very same topic – it all depends on what you say, how you say it and the “tone” of the essay.

[gibby]

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You shouldn’t have to forcefully inject anything, but your essay should have a point. Here are two examples for the 150-word extracurricular activity essay. Both essays were submitted to HYP five years ago so Admissions has already seen them, and as some college’s are scanning Admission Essays into http://turnitin.com/en_us/what-we-offer/originality-checking, I would suggest student’s not copy them, or paraphrase them.

Symbolically, becoming a cheerleader means conforming; making the high school team brings instant popularity, invites to the best parties, and perhaps a date with the starting quarterback. To quote the movie Bring it On, “Mothers would kill to get their daughters on squads.” The word itself conjures up the stereotypical image of a ditzy blonde in a short skirt.

Yet my choice to become a cheerleader was anything but a decision to kowtow to teenage conventions. At a math and science oriented school, cheerleading is considered an oddity; people who haven’t seen our halftime routines think the team is somewhat of a joke. But this has reinforced an important principle for me – to persist, even when approval is not immediate. Cheerleading has been very rewarding: it’s a good way to stay in shape through dance and stunting, and I’ve made some great friends at practice. No amount of strange looks I get in the hallway will change that.

We are a team of scrawny nerds. I’m five foot nine; only two guys are over six feet, and one of them is so skinny his nickname is “sticks.” Physically, our squad can’t compare in size to our opponents, who have broad shoulders, huge hands, thick legs, and muscular forearms. To compensate for our small stature, we work harder than any other team in our league. We do it because we love the game. Baseball has been my anchor, my home, my sanctuary. It’s meant pre-season games in the fall, daily workouts in the winter, having sweat drip down my nose as I bust out that final weighted sprint or pullup; it’s having friends to lean on, to share with, to tease; it’s buying oversized seven-foot tall teddy bears for each other on birthdays. At a math and science oriented school, where students compete against each other for the top grade, and clamor for a .01 percent increase in G.P.A., baseball has been as much about brotherhood as it has been about the game.