<p>does anyone have any essays that they wrote for the two-short answer ones that they wouldn't mind posting? i'm just worried about the two that i wrote sounding too generic so i thought it might be helpful if i could see someone else's to compare. thanks. :-)</p>
<p>if you truly want advice post yours and others will give advice or pm them you can pm them to me...i submitted my app already</p>
<p>i wouldnt wanna show mine to anyone until after the deadline to send in the essays...just being honest...lol</p>
<p>^^yea heh me too. Maybe after the first I'll post mine if others do too :o</p>
<p>If you would like me to look over any essays, private message me for my email (not that you all have a lot of time left anyways).</p>
<p>I am already in so I will post mine.</p>
<p>Though my high school is very liberal and mostly Democratic, this is not the case in my home. At the head of the dinner table is my mother, a Democrat who volunteered for the Kerry campaign. To her left is my father, a libertarian who, much to the rest of my familys dismay, voted for Bush in both of the past two elections. Across from my father is where my little sister sits. For a long time, my family believed that my little sister would be a much smaller version of my father. She looks like him, she is as quiet and non-confrontational as he is, and she shares many of his values. Now that she is fifteen, it is quite apparent that her social beliefs follow the live and let live attitude. Then there is me, the outspoken liberal and political activist. Living in this household has taught me that, even though politics are important in life, there is more to the bond of a relationship than who you clicked on the voting booth screen. Because of the environment that I have grown up in, I not only bring my passion for politics and serious discussion into my friendships, but a desire for balance among all different types of political opinions.</p>
<p>Everyone's are going to be different. No worries and good luck!</p>
<p>Now that the deadline is passed, would anyone else like to give theirs? I'm curious</p>
<p>meh i guess. this is my environment one.</p>
<p>I still remember the village. Mother and I entered each hut to examine their work. The fire danced with the airy blues and cotton whites that swarmed our feet. You could check the quality by running your hand across the knots. You see, the best rugs had the tightest knots. Our day trip ended soon after, and we headed back to our modest flat along the Mediterranean. We took the public bus as we always did, my eyes wandering from man to woman to child. We were the only westerners on the bus, a fact you casually get used to after having lived in western Turkey for two years. Muslims and Christians, Kurds and Turks, gazing out the same dirty windows. Grabbing on the same straps as our bus thundered through the rocky thoroughfares. I then understood diversity. Religion or culture didn’t divide us; it was only stubborn minds and age-old ignorance. London. Seattle. Rome. Istanbul. New York. Well traveled? Perhaps, but these locales are just words in a lesson, knots in a tapestry, but granted the tightest of the sort. You see, only the best rugs have the tightest knots.</p>
<p>alanstewart, i liked that one a lot. it was creative and effective in a confined word limit. </p>
<p>one of my short essays was 260 ish. does tufts online cut off??? :[</p>
<p>Yeah, I liked that one a lot too. The language was very fluid.</p>
<p>Thanks guys, thats reassuring :)</p>
<p>ekk no wonder I got deferred after reading these two essays ^ mine was twice as long and half as good! good job</p>
<p>Eh, I got in ED I already, might as well. I don't think it's that great btw, my essay on my environment:</p>
<p>My family, 'nas teaghlach in Gaelic, has provided me with the fortitude to pursue all my dreams and goals, and has helped forge me into the person that I am today. As a single parent, my mother never gave up, she fought to be the best of both world's each and every day. It was through my mother that I gained the knowledge that it is not enough to say you will do something, one must carry out their ideas to become successful in life. Growing up was not hard for me, it was quite the opposite, maturity came to me too fast, too abruptly, without the gradual changes of childhood. My grandparents, my mother, and I all resided in a small house; needless to say, both ideals and persons were a bit cramped. Living in an area comprised of mainly older families, I rarely saw the gleam of a baseball bat, heard the thud of a basketball, or the simple cries of youth. Rather, my weekends consisted of entertaining older businessmen and their wives with my youth and wit, at cocktail parties my grandparents arranged. However peculiar these events may seem to others, it is indeed 'nas teaghlach that has afforded me the passion I carry with me today.</p>
<p>alan- what is your intended major? your essay was outrageously creative and outrageously well written. it also made me somewhat depressed when i compared it with my essay, which i had previously thought was fairly strong... also, how much time did you spend on it? please dont say 5 minutes.</p>
<p>so in the time that has passed from my last post i have been trying to finish up my vanderbilt app. (due in 3.5 hours no less) yet im finding it difficult to keep my mind off of alans essay. so i thought id just succumb to my weak, nonconcentrating brain and just say once more: </p>
<p>alan - that essay was truly brilliant. i dont know wat your stats are, id assume they are good, but i think you should be accepted to tufts based on nothing more than that essay. if you have any other essays that you feel are of equal, or better, quality (id be willing to bet you do. its not like someone is able to write like that only once in their life) i would love to read them. if u dont feel comfortable with that i completely understand, but i though id at least ask cuz that one is just straight crazily awesome. feel free to PM them to me, or post them, or whatever if u feel comfortable. </p>
<p>back to work on my <em>now</em> horrendous vandy essays. meh.</p>
<p>omg...alan, your essay is actually distracting people! or maybe holden is just impressionable. alan, if you don't get in, i'll be truly horrified because the world is very unjust.</p>
<p>Heh, thanks. I think I wrote the core of it in a night and then edited it on and off the following week. My stats are ok (for CC I guess, I dont know maybe above average otherwise) and Tufts and Georgetown are my two reaches. My big weakness is that I have a 580 on the SAT writing section because I can't correct sentences or something. I tried taking it a second time and got the same score so I kind of gave up on that, and hoped my essays would make up for it. I dont know. I feel like my main CommonApp essay and my George Washington supplement essay (prompt was "Why GW?") are my strongest, but I'd prefer not to post either one of those. GW's deadline hasn't passed yet, and I think I'd like to wait a little longer before the CommonApp one goes out. I wrote the optional one for Tufts though and would be more than willing to post that. Basically I wrote it from the perspective of a child I would presumably meet in the future when I was in the Peace Corps. I thought it was kind of a cool idea and decided to try writing it. I feel like I kind of rushed my message, but I didn't want to make the thing too long. Anyways good luck with your Vanderbilt essays, I'm sure they'll be fine. It's my understanding that essays rarely make any significant impact in the admissions process.</p>
<p>Option 1: At your retirement party in 2054 (or thereabouts) a colleague praises your accomplishments by quoting Nelson Mandela. “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate,” Mandela said. “Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that frightens us most. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world.” What are your passions and talents? When you retire in that far-off year, what do you hope your legacy will be?</p>
<pre><code> I asked him once why he came here. Why he would come to Chad. He smiled, and glanced to the infinite horizon. It was evening and the day was retiring, each color dancing off the other. He motioned to the sun and answered “le soleil”. He stayed with me until the sun was lost and then he returned to his house with the other Americans.
</code></pre>
<p>His name was Alan. An American. His features soft, but powerful, like my father’s. When he smiled his cheeks would jut out and rise, his skin delicately folding. There was a group of fifteen of them. They were a part of the Peace Corps. He had just come out of university the year before, and brought with him his wealth of knowledge. Books and music and art! Works that stirred the spirit! He taught me what he could, his French improving nearly as fast as my English. I absorbed everything during his two-year tenure. Mathematics. Science. History. Biology. Political Theory. Each discussion, a canteen to my lips. I wondered how such a man of obscurity could offer so much. He didn’t always know the answers to my questions. I suppose it didn’t really matter. He knew who he needed to be. He loved life for what it was, a chance, a gamble. An opportunity to explore, and change someone, something, change yourself. What was the point otherwise? Change is the catalyst of life.</p>
<p>The night before he left I watched him play football with my brothers. They passed the ball back and forth, dribbling it between their feet towards the shadowy goal. It was soon dark, and the moon cast a superficial glow on the earth. Before he left that evening he told me the secret of what made a man great. He said some of the greatest in history have been the most ordinary, the simplest, deemed trivial by society. It was them who often took the greatest chances. Shook each opportunity, and grasped at every circumstance. I never heard from him again after that night. I imagine he walked across the tarmac and boarded his pipeline to the west in the morning. He would close the window shade and sit back while the propellers whirred, allowing his hat to partially cover his eyes. Smiling. Ready to take another gamble, another chance.</p>
<p>i showed my friend your knots one....</p>
<p>"it almost gave me shivers"</p>
<p>and then we both agreed we were probably in trouble with our essays.</p>
<p>actually toffee, i would honestly describe myself as <em>usually</em> unimpressionable. that essay would just such a good piece of writing, especially for its required, short length.</p>
<p>alan - wow. another great essay. my favorite line was "Each discussion, a canteen to my lips.". i cant believe u got a 580 on the SAT writing! it just shows how ridiculous and, at times, completely inaccurate standardized testing is regarding skill and intelligence. you really do have an amazing talent. make good use of it in college and beyond.</p>
<p>Dayum Alan your like my hero! Hah, actually I have a friend who writes in similar style as you. Out of all people I admit I am most most jealous of good writers. Touch</p>