<p>I am like completely confused with the question about the "submitting your page 217 autobiography" question ><</p>
<p>What is it that Penn asks? </p>
<p>Do I pretend that I'm writting from the future or now？</p>
<p>Do I need to really write a autobiography to do that?</p>
<p>It says you have written an autobiography, so your life up until now.</p>
<p>The idea, I think, is page 217 is a random page, so you choose what you want to write about. It’ll be so you can show your personality, the page number is irrelevant.</p>
<p>Write about something interesting that happened to you and remember, in a normal book the whole event doesn’t usually span just one page, so you could create suspense by starting ‘in media res’ and finishing on a cliffhanger.</p>
<p>Have fun with it.</p>
<p>Is it a bad idea that I did it as if my page 300 was now? So my 217 would have been like middle school (2/3 through my academic career so far)?</p>
<p>I interpreted the question as an autobiography that you would write later on in life. Page 217 could be some great accomplishment that you imagine you will have done by the time you are ready to write your autobiography.</p>
<p>i think something that happened in the past could be really helpful to getting in.</p>
<p>Right! Thanks everybody. It IS fun~~</p>
<p>@ttparent: surely an autobiography is what has happened, writing about something that you “imagine” might happen, is that not lying and defeating the object. Is Penn’s intention not to find out if you’re an interesting person, not if you have a good imagination/lofty goals?</p>
<p>@jennnnx3: I didn’t approximate to around 2/3 of the way through my life. They probably simply picked a random number. Mine’s about something that happened this summer…!</p>
<p>This is just a creative question. You haven’t written an autobiography and it isn’t likely that a high school senior could have one 300 pages long. The page number is arbitrary, not the beginning, not the end. Just be creative. You can use the future, past or whatever you would like. It is truly optional although any time you can give the school more information about you, the better.</p>
<p>Valuation, your application and other essays already contain all the significant things you have done. Yes, you can obviously repeat what you said or add on to what you have done, but you can also easily read the question as to say how you imagine yourself be in 20-30 years from now. Telling about your hope and aspirations do tell a lot about yourself, it’s just another way or angle that you can reveal something about yourself, definitely not a lie here. There’s no a right or wrong way of doing it in this optional essay, I believe.</p>
<p>Actually, I was confused about this question as well so I asked the regional director of admissions for my area.</p>
<p>He said that future projection approaches are most common, but he did not say whether or not it was detrimental to divurge from this approach. I had already written mine when I asked him, so I really don’t know if I will rewrite mine to take place in the future. </p>
<p>But, it is an optional essay. He told me to keep in mind that it was “truly an optional essay.”
I guess they really mean it if they say it’s optional on the application, on the website, and in person. :P</p>