<p>What did everyone write about for their “In reading your application, we want to get to know you as well as we can. We ask that you use this opportunity to tell us something more about yourself that would help us toward a sense of who you are, how you think, and what issues and ideas interest you most.” essay?</p>
<p>It’s the only essay I have left. I have been staring at it for days. Have people been writing mostly about significant experiences? Influential people in their lives? Why they named their cats what they did?</p>
<p>Have you written a Common App one? I used that (although, since I applied ED to Brown, I did it the other way around: wrote one for Brown and then used it for the Common App). I wrote about my experiences as a feminist. Really, write whatever you want: what you did last summer that changed you forever, your morning routine, why you love to play whatever it is that you play, the first time you did well in your math class...whatever shows something interesting about you!</p>
<p>Why not use the same one as the common app? Mine fits both topics perfectly..</p>
<p>EDIT: This might help</p>
<p>Think about any experience that you've had that shows something about you: a trip you've taken, a risk you've taken, a mistake, a success, a failure, an attempt, a project, a paper, a poem you wrote, a piano you played, a life you saved, a gift you gave, moving, grooving, losing something, gaining something, a realization, a contemplation, something you've seen, someone you've been, something you cleaned, stealing, being stolen from, a debate, something you hated, something you baked, something at stake, a win, a loss, a horse, a course, a class, a dance, a climb, a fall.</p>
<p>So, this is just a suggestion that someone passed on to me a few years ago that I used to write my Brown essay...</p>
<p>I carried around a notebook for a few days and wrote down every topic that I thought might be interesting to write about, such as how my friend and I would often debate about politics (especially while walking quickly between classes, a la west wing, :) ).</p>
<p>One day, in my AP Econ class, a topic captured my imagination and I threw down my whole essay in five minutes. It was a great essay, if I do say so myself.</p>
<p>Anyway, the take home point is feel free to explore any option that comes to mind, and zero in on one you want.</p>
<p>I used my CommonApp one for both Brown and Columbia. My teachers it's really good. I'm Muslim, so there was an obvious topic that I could write about. I tried to distance Islam from the terrorism and controversy that has been associated with it since 9-11. I tried to weave in my interests in history, political science, and religion and show them my writing skills. I wanted to show these sides of myself, instead of my interest in engineering and natural sciences because my extracurricular activities reflect those interests fairly well, and I knew there were essay questions specifically about those things.</p>
<p>I elaborated on one of my extracurriculars and how it has profoundly affected my life philosophy.</p>
<p>I'm using my common app essay and I have 2013 characters left, lol. And I don't feel that my essay is particularly short. Do they really expect us to have nearly, or even more than 5000 characters?</p>
<p>I wrote about something you're kinda not supposed to... about a drug-addicted parent and the diversity within myself even though I can't offer the school "diversity" on paper. I realized that you can't please all the people all the time, because trying too hard to write the "perfect" college essay will show. </p>
<p>My advice is, write about something you know you can write well about. And leave it at that.</p>
<p>forgottenhawk - mine was about that long, too, and as i thought that adding anymore would just be adding fluff, i felt confident about leaving it where i did.</p>
<p>I wish I saw this post earlier but then I went on vacation... : ( . I guess advice at this point is just for sharing general knowledge. I found that the carrying around a notebook and thinking about several different essay topics was a lot more effective for me - there were a number of topics I could write comfortably about that reflected myself but even within those, there are better topics and worse topics.</p>
<p>In my common app essay I wrote about how I literally think and rearrange pieces of information in my mind, and how this method of thinking came about from an interesting summer program. </p>
<p>A month later I read it and it sounded pretentious, didactic, and just... egh. I'm not particularly happy with it, but what can you do? When I was writing it, I was fairly confident, and in the end, it really does explain some of myself and how I write. But the topic itself predisposed me to write an essay that was me-me-me and I-think-creatively and I'm-special-and-here's-how kind of deal.</p>
<p>My Brown essay (um, ~6000 characters but I'm really pleased with it) described how a really provoking and intimidating teacher taught me how to appreciate fear's presence as an indicator that something really interesting is about to happen. This changes the tone to student-respecting-teacher, humbled, still-learning-and-ready-for-more kind of essay, which I felt was a lot better.</p>
<p>Do you guys think it will be bad if it is absolutely obvious that you just gave them the common app essay? </p>
<p>Mine is obvious because it is about an influential person, which is a prompt on the common app. I don't think most people will look at the Brown prompt and think: "Wow, I'm going to write about my friend ____ and how he has influenced me." Instead, most students would probably write about important experiences and such. </p>
<p>With that said, would Brown be a bit unhappy? Does writing about an influential person even go under that prompt?</p>
<p>Since a Common App essay choice is, in fact, topic of your choice, ANY essay you write that doesn't say BROWNBROWNBROWNBROWN etc. could have been taken from your Common App. They are looking for a solid, revealing essay. Brand-new or otherwise, it would seem.</p>