<p>Can you guys please help me with my Stanford short essay. Describe something that is intellectually exciting and why. I need some quick feedback so I'm posting it directly on a thread (although I would prefer not to); any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you very much for your time and help.</p>
<hr>
<h2>Using intuition, a child can answer that a person who is moving can throw a baseball faster than one who is not. Someone with a bit of Physics knowledge can even predict the speed at which the ball will travel given the velocity of the throw and the moving platform. For the most part, these ideas are correct. However, in a field of physics developed by Albert Einstein at the turn of the century, this is not the case. The theory behind Einsteins special relativity postulates has intrigued me for a great while, consuming much of my thinking time since our introduction. My fascination with the ideas can be attributed to several counter-intuitive consequences of the postulates. For instance, Einsteins theory eliminated the idea of a correct time or length, through concepts of time dilation and length contraction. According to Einstein, a person traveling at a fraction of the speed of light will measure a different time on a synchronized watch than a person who is at rest; the time measured in the moving frame will be considerably less than that of the rest frame. In addition to time dilation, special relativity brings about length contraction. In the case of length contraction, a person in a rest frame will measure a shorter length for an object in a moving frame. These ideas revolutionized the way the world was viewed and have proven invaluable to astrophysicists and nuclear physicists alike and they will undoubtedly affect the world for years to come.</h2>
<p>Once again, thank you very much for your help.</p>
<p>I am curious - why are you working on a Stanford essay now? I assume it is for next year - are you sure the application essay topics will be the same next year?</p>
<p>I am applying as a transfer student; the deadline is tomorrow. I have it all done, but this essay is the one that has been bothering me... I'm satisfied with the others as people have told me they are good but I haven't had much time to polish this one so I was hoping for some last minute help.</p>
<p>There are people at Stanford that know about Einstein's theories. I'd spend more of your space discussing WHY you are interested in those ideas and significantly less space describing something that is interesting but can be looked up in an encyclopedia. Good luck.</p>
<p>I believe the essay question was something like "Describe an experience or idea that you find intellectually exciting..." (My younger son has applied there, too.) The only problem I see with your essay is that I don't see enough of YOU in it. Of course, I am not a Stanford admissions person, but I think they are looking for something that shows them more of you. I suggest telling how you came across the idea and how you felt about it, why it excited YOU, not how valuable it is to science in general.</p>
<p>My son, for this question, described an experience he had while taking calculus--how he was struggling trying to understand a concept, and then finally it clicked and he was able to breeze through that lesson. He described how exciting he found it when calculus started to make sense, and how he missed that intellectual challenge in the statistics class he was taking this fall.</p>
<p>Now I'm not saying his approach is right and yours wrong. The ideal might be somewhere in the middle. His may be a little TOO personal, with not enough about the idea itself. However I think they really DO want more about you and less about the actual concept.</p>
<p>Good luck with your application! I already have one son at Stanford, and he loves it there. May your wishes come true!</p>
<p>This essay told me very little about you, it could have been the summary of a PBS video. If you can remember having an epiphany, or even a revelation...maybe that would tell the reader a little more about you.</p>
<p>Thanks for the advice, I'm changing the essay now... My other essays were very descriptive of me as a person if that makes any difference. I'm going to talk about a specific lecture I sat in on during high school and see how that goes. I'll post it here later if I get it done with enough time for further editing. Once again, thank you very much for all of your help.</p>
<p>Yeah,not much demonstration of who you are in that essay. Also I don't know how much merit there is in trying to express such complex ideas into a paragraph. It's hard to say anything meaningful about relativity in that kind of space.</p>