<p>Is the "Last Two Summers" an essay or can we just like catalog what we've done? Do we need to go in depth and explain it all?</p>
<p>no just briefly describe what you did</p>
<p>I also want to know. Gxing, please be a little more specific. We must say something like "June 15-30: staying home; July 1-15: visiting relatives; July 15-30: research project" and so on. Isn't it a little too briefly?</p>
<p>Describe what you did in paragraph form. Example:</p>
<p>Last summer I attended a 6-week tennis camp. Then in August, I volunteered at the local hospital. I concluded the summer with a tour of colleges.</p>
<p>^^elaborate on that a little more, but that's the basic idea. Keep in mind you don't have to list everything, just the important stuff. You don't have to go into detail because if it matters that much, you should have mentioned it in your activity sheet/essays/short answers.</p>
<p>So this isnt the place to be "creative" and show off your personality. It is strictly expository?</p>
<p>"Tell" not "show"? is basically what im asking</p>
<p>I injected a little bit of style into mine. I wrote about playing poker on friday nights, playing golf, and eating chipotle burritos. Definitely use paragraphs and make it flow.</p>
<p>I wrote my "Last Two Summers" like a mini essay. It says 150 words, or something, but mine was definitely about 300 words long. I wrote mine kind of strangely...the summer before junior year I went on four mission trips (the bulk of my summer) and was a junior counselor on some of them, so I wrote about how I "spent the first summer in a church van," describing how I felt like I lived in that van driving to different parts of Texas (and the United States) for my trips. The summer before senior year, I worked three jobs, so I wrote about how "and in the second summer, I lived in tennis shoes," because all my jobs required me to wear tennis shoes. This sounds really lame when I'm writing it right now, but I think it was fairly unique. I didn't write about parties or my birthday or swimming or eating snow cones, and you don't need to be that detailed, obviously. They just want to see how you spend your free time, and if you spent your free time reprogramming a computer or reading all the Harry Potter books and developing your own theories for Book 7, then be honest about that. I would discourage a bland "June 1-5: summer school" type list, though, because it doesn't show much creativity. In my mind, every single thing you put on an application that isn't a statistic about you (name/SSN/birthday/whatever) is a chance for you to show the adcom something desirable about yourself.</p>