<p>I wrote an essay that fit well as a response to one of the oddball prompts my year and also fit well with a common app prompt. (Sort of on purpose).</p>
<p>Chicago wants to see how you think and connect ideas. Everybody will have a different solution-- your solution can be creative, but it doesn't have to be.</p>
<p>degeneration, I think that's a very interesting and valid point</p>
<p>bump! for '13 applicants =)</p>
<p>any1 wanna read common app essay? Am stil working on the supplement 1st option...</p>
<p>This is the best post EVER. I only wish i had found it before i wrote my essays. :) Everyone is so refreshingly original, though i think i managed to stand out in mine as well. Anyone else get their finger stuck in a clipboard? lol. Ntmn, i would love to read yours; don't worry, i did EA. :)</p>
<p>I have a few essays that I'm sending to Chicago, so I'm going to post all of them except for my common app one.</p>
<p>AHEM.</p>
<p>"At present you need to live the question." - Rainer Maria Rilke, translated from the German by Joan M. Burnham.</p>
<p>What does it mean to live the question? I think thats recursively answered, but lets see if we can flesh it out a bit more. A question is something that you ask, something that you wonder about. It means to live in constant wonderment, to never stop being curious. To be constantly looking for truth. But what is truth? Truth is the feeling that you get when you are right. It is not the feeling that you get when you have the thought, Maybe that is right, or, Well, these studies sort of make this concept look like this is right. Truth is a self-assured rightness that you get from a deep examination or thorough explanation on a subject. Your personal conviction, your personal truth is the truest that you can get for that instance, because it is the best knowledge you have to work with. It is solely when you know that you are right; if you can change someone elses mind that person will be right too but if your mind is in turn changed then you are still right because you are following truth.</p>
<p>Truth is not inherently disarrayed, but it can be so elaborate that its trips and turns turn it into a slithy and uncontrollable beast that rips and tears your ability to comprehend, and violently mixes metaphors with the cold and yet sour beverage that allows the mind to stagnate and drive further into chaos, that which is confusion. Truth is a bad business altogether, and one that ought to be actively fought by authors. It is frequently, unfairly and in some cases unknowingly fought by authors, and although truth is represented in a meaningful way by the works of those like Einstein or Maxwell, who possessed the wonderful ability to collapse truths into smaller truths so that they become more like hors doeuvres that you munch on come brillig and less like the monstrous behemoths like the ugly rational functions that algebra students the world over must face on a daily basis. A good example of necessary entropy, however, is when the newest truths are found; without the strong foundations that Maxwell and Einstein had to build on, it would be foolhardy at best to try to find the same collapsed proof, much like trying to build a house of cards on thin ice. However, once you have happened upon the proper conglomeration of truths and half-lies that you can piece together into a lovely UFO in the sky that gyres and flickers, it is imperative to collapse that magnificent cake, to maybe a pancake or a flatbread, so that it is not too confusing; an incomprehensible truth is as bad as a lie.</p>
<p>Truth is a state of being, and cannot transmit itself, disease-like from person to person. Truth depends upon argument to do that. Argument is an extension of truth, and it helps to achieve further truth by ramming ideas together against each other and coming to some conclusion, as to whether one idea is better than another, if ideas really can be better than another, and why. If properly argued, an argument will probably lead to the, I cant believe that you do not subscribe to constructivist epistemology argument, followed by the, well, I suppose well just have to agree to disagree defense, with a small chance of sleet, or what we call in the business, changing someones opinion. Sleet is not necessarily the desirable outcome of every argument, since sometimes you are both arguing the same argument and simply do not realize it yet because your phrasing is awkward or your words are different. Argument is something that can quickly bring you to a new truth, a new comprehension of the world. However, some truths are too personal to be transmitted through argument and must be experienced.</p>
<p>Truth is the feeling that you get when that song hits you in just the right spot. You do not know exactly what it is, but it is when you hear words, and maybe they are nonsensical, but they are grokked in a way that you cannot quite understand. Perhaps the best example is by Sunset Rubdown, which hits in a way that is hard to comprehend with the song Stadiums and Shrines II. The lyrics, Theres a kid in there/and hes big and dumb and hes/kind of scared/well hes too old to be there/hes just looking for a ride and Im sorry that your mother died/That wasnt my fault/Im sorry anybody dies at all these days give you goose bumps and make you want to
reevaluate everything in your world, now that your eyes are open. This is the best music in the world. This is the music that you go and you listen to it again and again and again and you do not even need to look for meaning in the words because the deep emotions that they evoke in you are far more potent than any shoddy trope that the artist was trying for. The artist has hit pay dirt, and the listeners heart-strings are gold that no number of metaphors can buy. Maybe on paper the lyrics mean nothing, maybe on paper the lyrics are poetry comparable to Keats, but regardless, the instantaneous connection that you feel when you hear them is as deep as any you can garner from an intense study of writing.</p>
<p>Truth is certainly found in writing. There are times when you read a piece, and feel the deepest feeling of rightness in it. Imagine you are an aspiring author who loves to read, caught between your late best friends girl with terrible baggage, and a new girl, who loves you more than anything, and is relatively baggage free. If you read a book that reflects your problem, and is well written to boot, it will be the bitterest pill to swallow; the book most likely holds a solution, and whether or not to invest in a private porter. Even if it is a simpler issue, and your brother died and it destroyed you, and a complete ass is trying to get the time of day from your first kiss, when you read that book, the experience will be completely painful. The only thing worse than finding the solution is finding a lie where the solution should be. If you are a straight man, and you find yourself in love with a lesbian, if you read a book that tells you about a man who falls in love with a lesbian and eventually they live happily ever after, you will feel the deepest depths of disgust. This is a corrupted truth, with a huge build-up and an utter let-down. When you grasp a truth in writing, it should be the first order to finish the piece; you do not want to linger too long if it is going to betray you. After, you should make it your business to comprehend precisely the solution that the author suggests, and read it for pointers, to understand fully your situation, and to swallow your pill; it is bitter, but it will help you. As Jesus said, Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. Sadly, many people have taken Jesus words to heart, and in a way, misconstrued them, considering that truth could be found in faith and that if you have seen one, you have seen them all.</p>
<p>Truth is not faith, although they share characteristics. Faith, much like truth, is the feeling when you know that you are right, but unlike truth, it is also when you cannot accept the possibility of a different truth. You can have a truth that believes strongly in God, just as you can have a faith that believes strongly in God; because there is nothing to disprove the existence, there is no apparent difference between the two in this case. In other cases, however, instead of analyzing the possibility of an idea, you simply dismiss it out of hand, as a physical or metaphysical impossibility. People who have faith can have faith and truth simultaneously, but not about the same thing. You can have faith that the New York Yankees will win the pennant, and then even if they do not, feel that they have won it and that someone has pulled off some marvelous chicanery to convince the American public that they have not. At the same time, you can know the truth that purple is the best color for small children. However, you cannot at the same time have faith that green is the perfect color and hold that it is true that green is the perfect color.</p>
<p>Truth is in general a feeling of rightness in the world, that which is thrown into disorder by any kind of disruption in world-view or understanding. The truth of American invulnerability was shaken by Pearl Harbor, and the attack on September 11th. Instantly, you were shaken into a new truth, and continued to be shaken into newer truths, with brief periods of instability without any kind of truth; is it okay to give up civil liberties when you are this scared, you asked yourself. When this feeling of rightness, this equilibrium is destroyed, everything comes to a halt. The mythical defender of the Jews in Prague against anti-Semitism was a great construct of mud and magic, created by their Rabbi. It was called Golem, Hebrew for fool. On his forehead was written Emet, the Hebrew word for truth. When the aleph was erased from his skull, the living construct, friend to the Jews, simply stopped moving, the fool killed by this simple act of eradicating truth. It is of vital importance to keep truth alive, since without it, we dissolve into faith, and declare anything that does not follow the faith to be heresy, blasphemy, or arguably worse, we enter the purgatory that exists when you are unsure. To avoid faith, truth must be followed, and to avoid insecurity of rightness, argument must be praised.</p>
<p>Why Chicago?</p>
<p>When people ask me where Im applying, I immediately name the University of Chicago. The response I occasionally hear is the unofficial motto of University of Chicago: Where Fun Goes to Die. I can see Fun in my minds eye, old and withered, enjoying his last days playing bingo and discussing Hegel with Games over Meals on Wheels. It seems rather nice, actually. When I thought about what I wanted out of a college, I decided that I wanted a college with students who dont mind having a punishing workload. The University of Chicago has a reputation for being extremely difficult to get into despite not having a particularly low admission rate, because the student body self-selects to such a great degree. People do not call the University of Chicago a hand-holding school. It seems like only the kids who really want this kind of an education, like me, are the ones who apply and get in. The common core provides each student with a foundational curriculum in a wide range of subjects. Since everyone starts from at least a certain level, the classes can start from a higher stage and go at a faster pace. It isnt fun to go to classes with people who completely disdain fields of study that arent their favorite and cant decompartmentalize their minds because there simply isnt anything of use in the other compartments.</p>
<p>Beyond that, University of Chicago is special because it is in Chicago. Chicago is quite the citythere is something happening all of the time, and there are tons of museums, shops, and job opportunities. I visited Chicago last year in early Spring. There had been forecasts of rain, and I had brought a jacket. As I stepped out of OHare, I found that my socks were soaked, and I quickly ducked back inside to get my bearings and find an umbrella. As I navigated Chicago, I discovered a weather that, quite honestly, I had never seen before. It wasnt rain, nor sleet, nor snow, but some wicked combination of the three, as if the clouds were dropping slush on me. The wind pierced my thin jacket as I looked for a bus stop. Teeth chattering, I thought, Hell yes! University of Chicago also has a vibrant campus life which is definitely appealing; there are some colleges that I have visited where people just disappear from the campus for the weekends, and I would like to see more of a cohesive student body than just one where the kids take classes together and thats it. </p>
<p>My perfect college experience would be one where I take a lot of hard classes with compelling professors and engaged classmates who have varied interests, work really hard, learn a lot, make good friends, become more worldly, and come out a lot smarter than I am today. Chicago fits that to a T, so I suspect that we would become very good friends. That is my idea of fun.</p>
<p>Talk about a book/movie/piece of music that you like, and why you like it (I'm paraphrasing).</p>
<p>For the years between nine and thirteen, I read almost exclusively the genre of fantasy for pleasure. My cousin, who had similar tastes when she was my age, suggested that I give Neil Gaiman a whirl. Neverwhere was my formal introduction to intelligent literature, and in an instant, I fell in love. Gaiman manages to write fantasy in a fun and enchanting way unmatched by anyone except for Terry Pratchett, the other British literary giant in fantasy, while much darker and more complex than Pratchetts work. Fantasy is an interesting medium for literature. In magical realism, one can simply slip in the magic where it suits, and forget about it when it isnt needed; in fantasy, you need to play along with the rules of the world at all times. If the authors forgets they exist, the world falls apart. In that delicate balance, every single element needs to be well thought out, and the tricks at the disposal of the protagonist need to be meaningful and interesting. Gaiman has succeeded beyond anyone else I have ever read in the genre. He collaborated with Terry Pratchett to write Good Omens, a parody of Christianity and more specifically the film The Omen, and is the master of several mediums. He wrote the dubbing for Princess Mononoke which in many ways makes Jirobo a more interesting character than he is in the original, the award winning Sandman series for DC comics, and the childrens book Coraline, which spooks adults but amuses children. He has a few short story collections out that really made me begin to understand the short story, expounding on the cool hints that Haruki Murakami had given me earlier in his collection The Elephant Vanishes about the true nature of the short story.</p>
<p>Recently, Gaiman has been expanding his horizons and wrote American Gods, an exploration of the American novel. He found someone to help him Americanize his writing, and he gives an interesting critique of the culture of materialism in America in an American style of writing. It doesnt flow as naturally nor as cleverly as his other work, but it is extremely interesting to see an American novel in the hands of a British author. His more recent piece, Anansi Boys, fittingly set in the same universe, follows his theme of expanding his horizons, and really feels like it was written by a peculiar blend of Gaiman and Zora Neale Hurston, with a dash or two of Jamaica Kincaid thrown in the mix. Some of the West Indies slang feels inauthentic, but it was a thoroughly enjoyable read, and he managed to telegraph his points about the importance of storytellers and entertainers clearly enough. I certainly believe itNeil Gaiman is a master storyteller, and in many ways he has inspired me to write and to explore the boundaries of who I am.</p>
<hr>
<p>Please tell me what you think!!!!!</p>
<p>I do not think it's wise-- particularly on an open internet forum-- to post essays you have not yet submitted (or to post essays at all anywhere, really). The copy-paste demons are out there.</p>
<p>But that's up to you.</p>
<p>I applied EA, I'm not particularly worried.</p>
<p>Wow! you can write... would love to meet you at Chicago ;) I would put mine up.. but i guess i'll wait till RD's are over or till i get my decision. My "live the question" is a very different approach from yours. Mines a story. Mail me and i can send it to you...</p>
<p>Oh ya and I love Terry Pratchett!</p>
<p>Wow.. my live the question prompt is very different from yours as well. Mine uhh.. sounds really simple.. with relatively little to no "big" words.. and the whole essay is made up of all questions. My uchicago essay highlights the core alot more and just me picturing myself @ chicago. Nevertheless, I like your essays.. some parts confused me a little bit but I liked your imagery "as if slush was falling on me" ... sweeeet. I'll post mine after Jan 1st.</p>
<p>Wow, our essays couldn't be anymore different. haha.</p>
<p>I guess it is just me but I am very opposed to posting my essays onto an online forum, or just anywhere in general. The closest thing I come to it is using bits and pieces of essays as blog posts and visa versa. Oh well, best of luck to you!</p>
<p>We prospective Chicago students like saying "wow" don't we ;)</p>
<p>Just for future reference, any improvements you would suggest?</p>
<p>I loved your 'live the question' essay. we took it as the same meaning but again, very different approaches. </p>
<p>one thing to point out is that you put all these ideas in one paragraph and mixed them all together. particularly in the 2nd paragraph, when the reader is still trying to comprehend what your style is. i had a hard time following your thoughts, which were neat, but needs more organization..? This is just a suggestion, of course. everything comes together in the end so you might not have to revise anything. plus, i know how hard it is to cut down even a word of your essay (everything becomes estranged after some revising, i think). Therefore, maybe you should just leave as it is; however, if you feel it still needs some revising, then i suggest to make your ideas more clear :)</p>
<p>Ha, okay, I just realized that I posted the unrevised essay--the point of that paragraph was to be written in a bad style as to be as unorganized and ugly as possible, to show that there are different ways of conveying truth. So I am going to replace the unrevised essay with the revised essay in the post above.</p>
<p>Edit: Okay, so it looks like I can't edit my posts after a certain time period. Anyway, this is the actual response. As you can see, much more concise, I edited out the ugly paragraphs too.</p>
<p>What does it mean to live the question? I think that’s recursively answered, but let’s see if we can flesh it out a bit more. A question is something that you ask, something that you wonder about. It means to live in constant wonderment, to never stop being curious about the truth. But what is truth? Truth is the feeling that you get when you are right. It is not the feeling that you get when you have the thought, “Maybe that is right,” or, “Well, these studies sort of make this concept look like this is right.” Truth is a self-assured rightness that you get from a deep examination or thorough explanation on a subject. Your personal conviction, truest that you can get for that instance because it is the best knowledge you have to work with. It is solely when you know that you are right; if you can change someone else’s mind, that person will be right too but if your mind is in turn changed then you are still right because you are following truth.</p>
<p>Truth is the feeling that you get when that song hits you in just the right spot. You do not know exactly what it is, but it is when you hear words, and maybe they are nonsensical, but they are grokked in a way that you cannot quite understand. Perhaps the best example is by Sunset Rubdown, which hits in a way that is hard to comprehend with the song ‘Stadiums and Shrines II’. The lyrics, “There’s a kid in there/and he’s big and dumb and he’s/kind of scared/well he’s too old to be there/he’s just looking for a ride” and “I’m sorry that your mother died/That wasn’t my fault/I’m sorry anybody dies at all these days” give you goose bumps and make you want to
reevaluate everything in your world, now that your eyes are open. This is the best music in the world. This is the music that you go and you listen to it again and again and again and you do not even need to look for meaning in the words because the deep emotions that they evoke in you are far more potent than any shoddy trope that the artist was trying for. The artist has hit pay dirt, and the listener’s heart-strings are gold that no number of metaphors can buy. Maybe on paper the lyrics mean nothing, maybe on paper the lyrics are poetry comparable to Keats’, but regardless, the instantaneous connection that you feel when you hear them is as deep as any you can garner from an intense study of writing.</p>
<p>Truth is the end of the story, the sum of its parts. Fundamentally, the piece should make sense. The surprises are in context, the twists add to your understanding of it, and tie together loose ends. Or maybe it ends open ended, and asks more questions than it raises. But a story that ends in an open ended fashion should be open ended, and a story that has a specific end without any questions should end without questions. There is a feeling that you get when you are reading a work of writing, of ebb and flow. In mathematics, we describe a graph that works smoothly like this as “continuous.” Don DeLillo’s White Noise is a perfect example. There is a sense of inevitability in White Noise. This is not to say that it is predictable; there are surprises and new secrets every time you turn the page. But the end is a logical conclusion, as the awareness of death breathes new life into life, you feel like the argument has changed and evolved throughout the book, but it was all building up to this. This answer is the answer to a question that asks for an answer, and it fits – if White Noise were to end as Wilder ran out into the middle of the road, that would be near criminal. It would desecrate truth, spit on it. But Invisible Man ends with the question, “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” The question is the answer to a question that asks for a question. Providing an answer would be false, and an over-simplification of race relations in the United States. Only by ending this in such an open ended way could Ellison really explain his point, and because he knew that, he wrote the entire piece with this in mind. The mode of the answer is as important as the question, and it can sometimes tell you as much about the answer as the answer itself.</p>
<p>Truth is not faith although they share characteristics. Faith, much like truth, is the feeling when you know that you are right, but unlike truth, it is also when you cannot accept the possibility of a different truth. You can have a truth that believes strongly in God, just as you can have a faith that believes strongly in God; because there is nothing to disprove the existence, there is no apparent difference between the two in this case. In other cases, however, instead of analyzing the possibility of an idea, you simply dismiss it out of hand, as a physical or metaphysical impossibility. People who have faith can have faith and truth simultaneously, but not about the same thing. You can have faith that the New York Yankees will win the pennant, and then even if they do not, feel that they have won it and that someone has pulled off some marvelous chicanery to convince the American public that they have not. At the same time, you can know the truth that purple is the best color for small children. However, you cannot at the same time have faith that green is the perfect color and hold that it is true that green is the perfect color.</p>
<p>Truth is in general a feeling of rightness in the world, that which is thrown into disorder by any kind of disruption in world-view or understanding. The truth of American invulnerability was shaken by Pearl Harbor and the attack on September 11th. Instantly, you were shaken into a new truth, and continued to be shaken into newer truths, with brief periods of instability without any kind of truth; is it okay to give up civil liberties when you are this scared, you asked yourself. When this feeling of rightness, this equilibrium is destroyed, everything comes to a halt. The mythical defender of the Jews in Prague against anti-Semitism was a great construct of mud and magic, created by their Rabbi. It was called Golem, Hebrew for fool. On his forehead was written “Emet,” the Hebrew word for truth. When the aleph was erased from his skull, the living construct, friend to the Jews, simply stopped moving, the fool killed by this simple act of eradicating truth. It is of vital importance to keep truth alive, since without it, we dissolve into faith, and declare anything that does not follow the faith to be heresy or blasphemy. Or, arguably worse, we enter the purgatory that exists when you are unsure.</p>
<p>*As I navigated Chicago, I discovered a weather that, quite honestly, I had never seen before. It wasn’t rain, nor sleet, nor snow, but some wicked combination of the three, as if the clouds were dropping slush on me. The wind pierced my thin jacket as I looked for a bus stop. Teeth chattering, I thought, “Hell yes!” *</p>
<p>That's an interesting reaction to getting "slushed" on.</p>
<p>Wow. So much more brilliant than my essays...</p>
<p>I like the snow, I like the cold, I like layering, I like the dichotomy between a warm interior and a freezing exterior, I like wind, I like earmuffs, I like heavy jackets, I like numb toes, I like chattering teeth, I like warm undershirts and long pyjamas. I like the hogbutcher for the world, and I wanted to illustrate that as quickly as possible.</p>
<p>yeah those blow away my essays. Coming into all of this i felt disadvantaged because my school isn't very writing intensive. And clearly you have a penchant for writing. drownergirl</p>
<p>Haha, thanks! I actually missed the writing course in junior year, took physics instead, but it's nice to hear that I'm not too bad! Everyone who applied to UChicago from my school last year got in, but one of my favorite writers last year (I vividly remember a poem she wrote about math, simply gorgeous) was deferred until regular application time. So . . . it's not all about being able to turn a good sentence. I have sort of crappy extra-curriculars and my GPA isn't perfect, so don't worry, I'm sweating with the rest of you.</p>