<p>I'm planning my main essay right now, but I realized I have no idea what is it exactly UChicago wants. Do they just want to know how I think and how well I can make logical arguments, or do they except more explicit references to me - as an individual (how I'd be an valuable addition to UChicago, my personal experiences, etc)? And does humor matter that much? I've seen essays both on here and elsewhere that are hilarious, but don't actually demonstrate the vast intelligent of their authors. If I were to write a well-reasoned persuasive type paper (whose topic maybe conventional, but whose ideas may not be that orthodox), would that other forms of essay?</p>
<p>I think you should write whatever you want to write and not think about what other people might "want" to see. I imagine a lot of different kinds of essays pass through the admissions office, and many students (me, for one) write essays uninformed of the vast essay depositories available on the internet (or this site). Write what you would have written if you never stumbled across this website.</p>
<p>No one except the admissions office readers knows what they are looking for.</p>
<p>FWIW, I am not an advocate of the "game" approach to admissions - trying to figure out what they want and provide that. The process is much more complex and subtle than that. Adcoms only really want one thing: to know you, the applicant. </p>
<p>So be yourself.</p>
<p>S never looked at anyone's essays -- not his friends, not those posted online, not even the topics they covered. (I stayed away from the CC threads, too, because I didn't want to know, either.) I didn't get to see his essays until they were fairly fully formed. Whatever you say, it says something about you and how you think. Don't try to game it -- just write about what matters to you.</p>
<p>Yes, be yourself. </p>
<p>When S1 visited it was a very calm time and there were just a few students and parents sitting around a big table at the info session. The admissions person kept saying "just let us know what you are thinking" , "tell us what you are thinking about".</p>
<p>thanks a lot for all of your replies. However, I do still need 1 more clarification: do they want to know about me (personally) or my academic writing capabilities (grammatical, logical, or otherwise). I know these two aren't mutually exclusive, but which one do they want to see more of?</p>
<p>You should be writing about "yourself", and through writing about "yourself" you are employing some kind of thought structure (as well as syntactical/lexical/grammatical structure).</p>
<p>I use quotation marks around "yourself" because you do not need to write about real-life events or events that happened to you to write about yourself or let your personality come through in an essay.</p>
<p>A Chicago admissions officer once told me that the major place that applicants fail is when they try to make their essays sound like what they think the admissions office wants rather than making them sound like themselves. So...if you're funny, make it funny. If you're not, don't. Put yourself in it if you want; don't if you don't. </p>
<p>There's a thread over on the Parents forum in which a number of people mock the Chicago essays, saying that they promote "cute and pretentious" answers that don't provide a window into what a student is really like. I disagree completely, and if you're a good fit for Chicago, I bet you'll disagree too once you're finished. My D, who's at Chicago, wrote an essay that may have had some "cute and pretentious" aspects to it, but, without setting out to deliberately do so, showed more about her than anything she could have written for the common app. </p>
<p>Just plunge in, and see where it takes you. Best of luck.</p>
<p>I agree with Seashore. I think the Chicago essays invite creativity and openendedness, and it seems like future college students "get" the essay prompts more than parents who are used to applying the gloss and doing things the "right" way.</p>
<p>Think about all of the essay prompts from past years-- they are all confusing, wacky, say whhaaaaa? I think they're meant to encourage some real thinking through-- there IS no right answer.</p>
<p>I think that if a student is really of the Chicago sort, the prompts are a delight and a challenge. If they elicit anxiety and insecurity, it may be time to consider whether Chicago is the place for you.</p>
<p>Look, almost anything that anyone writes gives some insight into the author's personality, unless it's completely formulaic. Pick a paragraph, any paragraph, from Marcel Proust, Lewis Thomas, Stephen Jay Gould, Virginia Woolf, Maya Angelou, Adrienne Rich, Cicero, Montaigne . . . and you know a ton about those people, how they write, how they think, what they care about.</p>
<p>Do that. Write something that someone else would want to read, not a guide to your resume or a personals ad. (Sporty SWM NMS/NHS 3.8 2290 ISO hi-USNWR LAC or mid-sz pvt U 4 intellectual intercourse, Greek culture.) The essay isn't ABOUT you -- everything else in your application describes you from one or another angle -- it IS you. Your thought, your work product. Show, don't tell, that you pay attention to the world and can communicate what you think.</p>
<p>I believe I read that the admissions folks are looking to see how one "handles ideas." They are admitting for the faculty, and when asked will tell you so. The question they ask is, "What will this applicant be like in class?" Your essay should occasion them saying, "This person would be fun to have in a course." Ted O'Neill, I believe, still teaches a course in the Core and this is important to him and as a result is likely a part of the current admissions culture.</p>
<p>JHS, this D/D free SWF into some NSA geekdom just rofled.</p>
<p>I spent a few days drafting and writing my essays for UChicago. They were very close to the ones I wrote for Penn. The day the application was due I felt that the essays weren't right and changed all of them. I wrote 3 essays in a few hours, all of them spontaneous and spur of the moment. I'd say I liked those essays the most.</p>
<p>S wrote his main Chicago essay last August. He put it aside because he thought that it wasn't "Chicago" enough. Worked til mid-October on a different main essay. In the meantime, he also went back for an on-campus interview and to sit in on Hum classes. He came home, went back to the first essay, realized it was exactly what he wanted to say, polished it and used it instead.</p>
<p>By that point he understood they were looking for people who like to think, have interesting perspectives and aren't afraid to discuss them.</p>
<p>The other two Chicago essays pretty much wrote themselves once he was in the right mindset.</p>
<p>My "Why Chicago" essay was a snap once I visited campus. I don't think I've written any other two or three paragraphs with such ease in my life. And that's more or less when I knew Chicago was right for me. And it's also telling that I modeled every other "Why X?" question after my Chicago one, but to me the "Why X?" answers still reeked of Chicago. I decided it wasn't worth applying to schools I couldn't put up a good argument for once I got back my EA decision.</p>
<p>My uncommon essay became easier to write once I decided on a topic. It was a topic that was pretty "common" but fit well with one of the more oddball prompts. I wrote three or four versions before I was able to identify exactly what I wanted to say. I spent the rest of the time refining what I wanted to say. My final essay was much simpler and much clearer than my first attempt, which was a pretentious and garbled pseudo-academic mess.</p>
<p>(Ann Lamott,writer extroadinaire, likes to talk about the need for ***** first drafts. I encourage all of you to write those horrible and awful first drafts before you move on to what you really want to say).</p>
<p>The favorite things essay (the one that's now optional) was the hardest for me to write. It took me a while to find an object that I wanted to write about, and I went through a lot of icky practice essays. </p>
<p>Anyway, if this post has any point, it's that if you know you're interested in Chicago, start working on those essays NOW, and keep them on the back burner until they are due. There is no right way to write these essays, and it takes time to make sure you're writing what you want to write.</p>