New Essay Questions up!!!!!!

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
1

<p>I jusssst saw these floating around on the new admissions website. I think they look super-fun!</p>

<p>Essay Option 1
"At present you need to live the question."—Rainer Maria Rilke, translated from the German by Joan M. Burnham.</p>

<p>Essay Option 2
The short film Powers of Ten begins with an aerial shot of a couple picnicking in a Chicago park. The camera zooms out ten meters. It then zooms out again, but the degree of the zoom has increased by a power of ten; the camera is now 100 meters away. It continues to 1,000 meters, then 10,000, and so on, traveling through the solar system, the galaxy, and eventually to the edge of the known universe. Here the camera rests, allowing us to examine the vast nothingness of the universe, black void punctuated sparsely by galaxies so far away they appear as small stars. The narrator comments, "This emptiness is normal. The richness of our own neighborhood is the exception." Then the camera reverses its journey, zooming in to the picnic, and—in negative powers of ten—to the man’s hand, the cells in his hand, the molecules of DNA within, their atoms, and then the nucleus both "so massive and so small" in the "vast inner space" of the atom.
Zoom in and out on a person, place, event, or subject of interest. What becomes clear from far away that you can’t see up close? What intricate structures appear when you move closer? How is the big view related to the small, the emptiness to the richness?</p>

<p>Essay Option 3
Chicago author Nelson Algren said, "A writer does well if in his whole life he can tell the story of one street." Chicagoans, but not just Chicagoans, have always found something instructive, and pleasing, and profound in the stories of their block, of Main Street, of Highway 61, of a farm lane, of the Celestial Highway. Tell us the story of a street, path, road—real or imagined or metaphorical.</p>

<p>Essay Option 4
Argonne National Laboratory and Fermilab (both national laboratories managed by the University of Chicago) have particle accelerators that smash bits of atoms together at very high energies, allowing particles to emerge that are otherwise not part of the everyday world. These odd beasts—Z bosons, pi mesons, strange quarks—populated the universe seconds after the Big Bang, and allow their observers to glimpse the fabric of the universe.
Put two or three ideas or items in a particle accelerator thought experiment. Smash 'em up. What emerges? Let us glimpse the secrets of the universe newly revealed.</p>

<p>Essay Option 5
Take as a model Options 1 through 4 as you pose and respond to a prompt of your own. Please do not submit an essay written for the Common Application. Your prompt should be original and thoughtful. Draw on your best qualities as a writer, thinker, visionary, social critic, sage, sensible woman or man, citizen of the world, or future citizen of the University of Chicago; take a little risk and have fun.</p>

<p>University</a> of Chicago College Admissions | Essay Questions</p>

2

<p>I've seen enough of these question sets over the past few years to get a sense of the overall pattern of each one.</p>

<p>There's usually a )#($<em>#)(</em>@#$ quote, that is finnicky and completely open to interpretation. (Last year, "What do pictures want?")</p>

<p>There always seems to be an offer to write about a Thing. The Thing this year is a street. Last year's Thing was a table, my year's Thing was a string, the Things before that have been Wednesday and big mustard.</p>

<p>Usually there's also a more math/science option. Two years ago it was describing yourself as a mathematical function, and this year it's the zoom in/ zoom out one. Of course the answer does not HAVE to be math/sciencey, but I think that math/science people will probably find an easy way to talk about what they love to do.</p>

<p>The "mash two things together" idea is reminiscent of last year's improv comedy question, but it sounds much more flexible. </p>

<p>And there's always the option 5, if you want to create your own.</p>

<hr>

<p>It's clear from the nature of these questions and the variety of ways in which they are asked that admissions is not looking for a single answer to them or a single method of answering (although it should be in words...) A lot of kids in the past have stumbled over the intention of these questions and whether they are "getting" the "right" answer; I can tell you (from having read essays that people send me) that there are so many amazingly different approaches to the same question, approaches that I didn't even imagine possible until somebody showed me one.</p>

<p>Also, much contrary to what rumors seem to surface on these boards, you do not need to write about something imaginary or weird if you don't want to. Many of my friends and I used the uncommon prompts as a launchpad for talking about ourselves in traditional college-essay form; some of my friends went a different route and did fiction, stream of consciousness, etc. Just make sure that whatever you end up sending in is something you are proud of.</p>

<hr>

<p>Start writing the essay ASAP. After two days or so of thinking about the questions on and off (when they went up in mid-July the summer before my senior year) I was able to zero in on the question I wanted to use and what I wanted to write about. I wrote about three or four different solid drafts of that essay in different styles before I found one that worked.</p>

<p>Remember that an essay should have some kind of "take-away message." Think about somebody reading your essay, investing time and thought into it... what are they going to learn from your essay that they didn't know in advance? Is the take home message something that's pretty self-evident, particularly to a 17-year-old, or is it something more nuanced? Essays with take home messages like "Winning the state championship was really fun!" or "Community service is a great thing to do!" are soggy, not necessarily because the topics are common but because a third grader could have told you those things.</p>

<p>Some essay advisers are against the D's: death, depression, divorce, and disease.... I intensely disagree, if only because I've read delicate and thoughtful essays about the D's, essays that have been rewarded with admission into dream schools. The people who get in don't get in because terrible things have happened to them or their family, but because they are able to collect, observe, and interpret it.</p>

3

<p>I don't like the )#($<em>#)(</em>@#$ quote at all; it's not even a question, simply a statement.</p>

4

<p>Which is why it's a UChicago essay...</p>

5

<p>While the other three essay topics are broad and vague, at least they ask you to write about something. The first one is just inane in its scope. That's not characteristic of UChicago essays in general, though.</p>

6

<p>Perhaps you'd relate more to a longer verstion of the quote:</p>

<p>Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.</p>

7

<p>I didn't mean to suggest that the quote itself was poor, but that a single statement like that does not constitute an "essay question."</p>

8

<p>Well, if you can't open yourself to it, you can't. There are other options, and other schools. But I know a lot of people who loved the quote "questions" from a couple of years ago,</p>

<p>“Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.”</p>

<p>and </p>

<p>means “mind that does not stick.”</p>

9

<p>On the page with the essay questions, there is no suggestion for the length of the essay. Am I not looking in the right spot, or is there no specified length for the essay? If it's the latter, what would be an appropriate length? Thank you!</p>

10

<p>Your Chicago essay should be as long as you consider enough.</p>

11

<p>I like Question 1...I've lived long enough (!) to go some place with it.
S1's Option 5 was 2 1/2 pages single spaced -- 1300-something words. That was on the long end of what I recall from last year's applicants. However many words you write, make them sing.</p>

12

<p>Well, that's what I was thinking. Just wanted to make sure=)</p>

13

<p>When UChicago still had the uncommon app, it suggested you write "a paragraph or two" for essays #1 and #2, and to write "a page or two" for the extended essay.
I'm sure you can do whatever you want.</p>

14

<p>I like the "as long as you need it to be," particularly because I read CountingDown's s's essay ex post facto and I don't think it could have retained its character if it were shorter.</p>

<p>Remember that admissions officers are human, though, and try to gauge where or at what point they might start skimming. If you think you need help judging that, ask a parent, teacher, or a friend to read your essay over for you and be honest with where they start to get bored.</p>

15

<p>...does the common app version still have the "Why Chicago" and "favorite things" essays? </p>

<p>and do we have to do the common app, or is the uncommon app still available?</p>

16

<p>Just to support the "as long as it needs to be" concept, it should also be a concise as it can be. Chicago applicants tend to need their words but a one pager can work. I'm sure my S's essay was significantly under 500 words but it sort of hangs with you a while after you read it (spoken as the mom, not exactly unbiased).</p>

17

<p>My essay was common app-sized.... under 500 too.</p>

18

<p>I like Question 3. I think I'll definitely write mine on question 3.</p>

19

<p>what the hell does that first statement even mean anyway?</p>

<p>oh..nvm</p>

20

<p>They are definitely gonna make you use the Common App, the uncommon will no longer be available...</p>