<p>I'm a senior in high school who's applying EA for uChicago. I'm wondering whether or not it would be a good idea to write my own question. My prompt would be, "What makes a good question?"
I'm wondering this because none of the application questions, despite their awesomeness, really appeal to me. Don't get me wrong, I love this college (from what I know), I just want to make sure I'm not going to be rejected because of my prompt.</p>
<p>Not at all. My son made up his own question and got in early. I never thought he would get in with what he wrote. He spent an hour or so writing a couple of paragraphs expressing whatever that was on his mind at that time and then spent a couple of days to come up with an appropriate prompt.</p>
<p>I don’t think so. The adcom from my area said that he made up his own prompt (about hamburgers, of all things).</p>
<p>There is nothing wrong with writing your prompt. I am a freshman (Class of 2017) at UChicago. Last year, I felt that the given prompts, albeit interesting, were very difficult to express what I wanted to say about myself. I am sure there were many people who wrote brilliant and compelling stories by answering “Where is Waldo?” or Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, but I wasn’t one of them. So I ended up coming up with my own prompt.</p>
<p>In short, your prompt itself does not matter as long as you can develop something meaningful from it.</p>
<p>Good luck with your college search.</p>
<p>I made up my own prompt and got in, so I’d say no. In fact, uchi loves quirkiness (obviously.) If you can come up with something original and execute it well, they’ll like it.</p>
<p>Many of the “official” prompts begin life as someone’s write-your-own prompt the year before.</p>
<p>Not at all. In fact, I made up my own prompt back in the day :P</p>
<p>From searching a bunch of threads about the same topic, it seems that there is a lot of success among people who wrote their own prompt. Either this simply is an odd occurrence, or the type of person who would write their own prompt would be the type of intellectual risk-taker that I’m sure UChicago wants. </p>
<p>To answer your question, it’s a good idea, and I’m doing the same thing myself.</p>
<p>Writing your own prompt can be a really good idea. I wrote about one of the most cerebral, least creative things I could think of as my own prompt and was accepted EA.</p>