Essay Suggestions?

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
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<p>Hi Guys and Gals,</p>

<p>First of all, best of luck to all you seniors waiting to hear back from Chicago and congratulations to all of you who've already been accepted EA. </p>

<p>I graduated (quite) a few years back from Chicago and like most people here went through a prolonged funk trying to come up with a suitable application essay for the most glamorous school on the South Side of Chicago. With the benefit of hindsight, some dubious, some not, I thought I'd share some ideas with you guys who are applying RD and may find yourselves in a similar rut. </p>

<p><em>As always, beware of free, unsolicited advice such as this!</em></p>

<p>1) God is in the details. Or so they say. In this case, this means that you should be as specific as possible in anything you write. Someone here posted an essay on mustard recently and made a reference to "huge" amounts of resources wasted on weapons throughout human history. The general idea behind the essay is pretty good, but the writer may want to take the extra step and actually calculate (using an appropriately clever algorithm) the actual amount of wasted resources in some objective way. Of course, you should be brief, but making a series of rather vague, personal observations will always get you in trouble! Even discussing the manufacture of mustard and condiments and its relation to the hotdog industry and baseball and restricted free agency and socialized sports and the ultimate, utter uselessness of Olympic gold medals may, for example, lead to some interesting conclusions...</p>

<p>2) It never hurts to be controversial. Chicago scholars are renowned for their lack of common sense in their pursuit of academic rigor (witness Iraq and the Chicago Straussians) and addressing topics such as the economic rationale behind falling in love (or the moral imperative to an even quicker divorce-Vegas, Baby!) will invariably lead you to rich pickings. The U of C has a well deserved reputation for the single minded pursuit of theory, perhaps even “Grand Theory” and there are definite dangers to such an approach. Prof. John Mearsheimer at Chicago addresses this to a certain degree in several recent works and the Law and Economics folks at Chicago have a notorious reputation for their rather ruthless approach.</p>

<p>2) Get a copy of Jean Baudrillard's "America", a pretty amusing book by the well known French philosopher based on his cross country trip from LA to New York. Armed only with a tape recorder and a pimped Caddy convertible, Baudrillard rambles on at length re: American highways, politics, Disneyland and tall buildings. The highlight of the book is a remarkable neo-marxist analysis of Mickey Mouse and post-modern culture. You may not agree with what he has to say, but the book is chock-full of brilliant, absurd and surprisingly clever observations on modern day life, morality and politics. Some of his vocabulary may be a bit off the wall, but his ideas come across pretty clearly and there is a ton of material to work with.</p>

<p>3) When all else fails, use the "contradiction" method whereby you pose a mundane logical contradiction and proceed to reconcile it based on some profoundly sad and funny experience in you life. For example, according to evolutionary biology, since most people are sexually attracted to people more attractive than they are (the "Ladder Theory"), one would think that a certain, good-looking segment of the population would have far greater opportunities to engage in sex and pass on their genes to successive generations. Eventually, one would naturally end up with a population group much more physically attractive than a population group that existed 10 or 20 or 30 generations back since ugly people would have increasingly fewer chances to have kids. And yet, we look around and there are large numbers of very unattractive people everywhere. What's going on here? You may want to look up some work done by Steve Levitt, the Chicago econ. guy for some additional ideas along this line (rationality of human behaviour). You should read his stuff anyway just because he's such a cool guy, but he may give you a whole bushel-full of ideas to work with such as why so many drug dealers live at home with their parents.</p>

<p>Anyway, that’s it for now and thanks for lasting this long. Hope some of this stuff helps and good luck!</p>

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<p>Thanks for taking some of your time to bestow knowledge upon us. As a side note, do you have any other book recommendations on the subject of economics and sociology/psychology?</p>

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<p>thanks, tk89...(few months ago, this post would have been god sent!) ;)</p>

<p>please don't take this personally:)</p>

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<p>it is still a god send to me, I'm rewriting my Chicago essay and I'm starting from square one, tk89 you are my hero</p>

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<p>Fakesnake00:</p>

<p>You may want to check out some of Victor Turner's work on ritual and liminality. He makes several compelling arguments on the rise of various social constructs that define and de-limit human behavior. Athough most of his research was done on primitive cultures, a lot of what he writes about still has relevance to current, sacred/profane social norms. When I was in film school at Columbia a few years back, one of my profs., a young, exceedingly brilliant and at times annoying guy named James Schamus had a fantastic course on B-movies and post-modern theory that was perhaps the most popular class in the whole school. He spent one memorable session riffing on the correlation between the limited budget of the teen flick "I Was a Teenage Wolfman" and Victor Turner's theory on social ritual. The low budget of the film limited the director to two days of shooting on a tiny patch of woods outside of LA and Schamus made a pretty amazing and funny as hell analysis on how this physical limitation related to the restrictive social norms and limits placed on 1950's teenagers and in turn, how the rituals of primitive coming-of-age ceremonies played itself out in grainy black and white shots of Michael Landon being chased around in circles through the Hollywood hills by sadistic middle-aged cops. </p>

<p>If you really want to get a good start on your summer reading list, check out “Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” by Fredric Jameson. This somewhat thick book has become pretty much staple reading for a lot of undergrad culture/anthro courses and will certainly offer a strong antidote to all the classics you’ll be reading your first couple of years!</p>

<p>Best of luck to you, chicagonobel and collegeconfusion -- it may seem like a real pain in the *ss right now, but you guys will be laughing about this in a year.</p>