<p>I understand it's difficult to answer in the general sense, so here's some detail:</p>
<p>I have written an essay that I am relatively happy with. At one point in the essay, I mention how my becoming more social led me to meet two students (among others) who have graduated in the past few years and currently go to two very good schools, but not the one I am applying to.</p>
<p>I say something along the lines of: "If I hadn't opened up, I never would have met the aspiring chemist from school x or the well-to-do volunteer from school y." My point is to show that I came to be more social and flourished when I met intelligent people who were going places (although I didn't put it so bluntly in the actual essay).</p>
<p>I'm wondering if this would anger the school I am applying to or if it would be O.K. </p>
<p>I know it sounds obsessive to be worried about this. Why not just delete it? But I'm actually kind of happy with the way it sounds. The quote I gave you is paraphrased.</p>
<p>If your point is to highlight how you’ve been influenced by two successful people then focus on the those people and how they influenced you, not the schools they went to. It sounds like you’re essentially name-dropping to emphasize how great they are. But you should be able to do this without mentioning the schools.</p>
<p>You have no clue what the relationship of the reader is to those schools. What if this person applied to school x 40 years ago, didn’t get in, and now x is the bane of his/her existence? That sounds super extreme, but you never know…</p>
<p>Thank you both. Even though I feel as though they’ll lose a bit of description, it shouldn’t make a big difference. I’ll just swap out the name drop for another one of their positive qualities and move on. I don’t want to go into too much extra detail since I’m 400 words over the suggested already.</p>
<p>Like you say, an application for one school isn’t the place to be praising another.</p>
<p>it’s probably fine but i don’t think that including the names of those two schools is really adding anything to your essay, and (again, in an extreme case) detract attention from other parts of your essay. the focus should be on you, not them, so the more details you give them the less you’re talking about yourself. but for the sake of descriptive writing it might behoove you instead to point out other details about them… WHERE did you meet them, how did you meet them, what would the old you have done, etc.</p>
<p>so while including those specific names isn’t going to hurt anything (most likely) i don’t think they are adding anything to the essay.</p>