Phillips Academy Andover Essay Help

For my Andover essay I choose to the one year research project and I feel like my topic is to dry. To me it’s really intresting I wrote about how I would want to research quantum gravity, but I feel like the admission people will get bored reading it or think I just looked all of the information up online and I’m just trying to show off. So should I pick a different essay topic or just change what research project I want to do?

Well, did you get the information from online? If it is a real passion of yours, then go for it. One thing to always do is make it sound like yourself. You want people you know to be able to read this essay and hear it in their head with your voice, or be able to recognize it is you. Admissions officers want to know who you are, so make sure you find a way to weave that into your essay. Make it so that not only are the admissions officers reading your essay about quantum gravity, but they really get to see how much you are interested in this topic and get a feel for the type of person you are. Just make it you.

Good luck!

@2020person I mean I did get the information online, but I looked it up a while back when I started reading up about quantum mechanics. This really is a passion of mine, I love physics, and one day I really do hope to discover quantum gravity. And thanks for the luck.

I think they are going to be more interested in hearing about WHY you like this topic instead of the details of the project itself. The admissions people aren’t going to be experts in physics, so write it at a level that can be understood easily by non-physicists.

IMO, if you have been really passionate in quantum gravity, the essays is bound to be with events, ideas and emotions with when, where, who, what, why and how. Those details can show how interesting person you are. It doesn’t matter if the subject itself is interesting or even understandable as they are not interested anyway. They are interested in you - how you have been taking it, how you feel about it and such.

On the other hand, if you read an article about quantum gravity one day, decided to be a physicist, but otherwise didn’t do anything about it except taking your science classes like everyone in your school did, so instead use your essay to teach readers what quantum gravity is as you learned from the online article, it can be boring and sound insincere.