<p>Karatekid, sure, feel free to send it to me in a personal message and I’ll try to get to it ASAP (though I may be a bit busy with my own college work)! I love editing! And hopefully I’ll be able to give a pretty unbiased opinion that you can’t get elsewhere, seeing as I don’t know you. However, I must stress that you shouldn’t ever put too much trust in people of the interwebs or let them influence you too much. I swear I’m a nice person and I want to help you, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I know what’s best for you essay-wise.</p>
<p>Rspence, I actually found it pretty hard to condense everything for the 100 word essays. University of Maryland had some standard essays, but then there were 10 140-character things where you just finish their sentence. I had some pretty great answers for a bunch of them (in my not-so-humble opinion), but I got fed up when I saw “One thing I didn’t expect to get out of a volunteer experience was…” It aggravated me because I knew they wanted me to write about having my eyes opened and meeting new people or something cheesy like that. Instead, I just wrote “monetary compensation.” :P</p>
<p>@ameliab12, haha yeah I hate when they thwart questions like that.</p>
<p>“One thing I didn’t expect to get out of a volunteer experience was…nothing, because I got what I expected.”</p>
<p>A friend I know completely trolled his Princeton essay…the topic was to describe a person who influenced him, and he wrote about a girl named Kotomi Ichinose who endured a hard life and lost both her parents in a plane crash…then mentioned at the bottom that Kotomi was from an anime. He got waitlisted…but it was a pretty brilliant essay IMO :)</p>
<p>Thanks ameliab! IM SO EXCITED. But not really : (</p>
<p>@rspence, that’s pretty funny! The best story I’ve ever heard heard was a kid who had an essay that said to ask himself a question and then answer it. His entire essay was, “Do you play tuba? No.” …he got into Brown.
There’s also a really funny essay by a guy named Hugh Gallagher that got him into NYU (and got famous on the Internet): [SS</a> > jokes > Hugh Gallagher’s ‘College Essay’](<a href=“http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/essay.htm]SS”>SS > jokes > Hugh Gallagher's 'College Essay')</p>
<p>@karatekid, it’s always easy to freak out over small things when they’re right in front of you. Try to remember that the world doesn’t explode if your essays aren’t perfect or even if you get rejected from a few colleges. Life goes on and so do you.</p>