Sending in college essay already published on Internet?

College Essays
1

Hey all!

I’m working on an essay for Yale, and the topic is something that I recently wrote a personal column on for my school’s online newspaper. I wasn’t going to copy paste the exact column, of course, and I was definitely going to take it in a different direction, but I’m not going to be surprised if some of the phrases are the same.

Will Yale detect this as plagiarism? (My name is published with the personal column online as well?) Will they think I’m lazy for writing about something that I’ve already discussed before?

heeeelp ;_;

2

I doubt that the admissions readers would run every essay through a plagiarism checker. Even if they did, however they’d quickly realize you were the author anyway. I don’t see anything wrong with displaying a viewpoint that you’ve already presented elsewhere. As long is it intelligently written (and not copied verbatim), you should be fine.

3

Agree- plagiarism is when you steel other people’s work… this is your work, right? Go for it.

4

@sgopal2 @suzyQ7 Thanks to both of you! I do agree that “self-plagiarism” is a bit of an oxymoron. :slight_smile: And, I ended up taking the essay in a completely different direction and only using similar phrases in a paragraph, so I think I’m good. Thanks for the responses again!