<p>I'm looking for some samples of essays that you thought got you in the door. Obviously at Cal the grades and scores are the main draw, but did anyone have an essay that helped them go from a maybe to a great diamond in the rough?</p>
<p>Please PM me the essay and maybe post a little about the subject on this thread...</p>
<p>I guess there’s no model essay for college admissions, just write an essay that truly conveys your passion in science and use some of your past experiences to back it up. After all, you have to love science and math to survive at Caltech.</p>
<p>I’m trying to do two things with reading up all the essays…
<ol>
<li>Trying to better understand how much detail and emotion should be in an essay, I like keeping things light, but I want to show real substance as well.</li>
</ol>
<p>I would assume that pretty personal/casual is ok, but I would still recommend that it be well written with standard grammar - no im-speak or anything. </p>
<p>My son’s (successful) essay was fairly formal (because he’s not a good enough writer to pull off casual), but it talked about his personal relationship with science. Very personal - thought-experiments only - he has no research or anything. He talked about how interested he is in solving various problems and gave examples.</p>
<p>Please be personal. The essay should be about you. It should tell as much about you as possible. The admissions counselors here like to tell a story about one applicant who wrote a wonderful essay about their grandmother. As the counselor pointed out, we are not admitting the grandmother to Caltech. Make it about you. </p>
<p>I think casual can be fine as long as you get your point across. Are you showing the admissions committee your passion for math/science? Are you giving them a good idea of what your personality is like? There should be emotion in your essays. They should sound like you really care about what you’re writing about. Anyone can string the words together to write an essay about how they like math/science. It’s the real emotion/passion that needs to come through in your essays.</p>
<p>would you like a copy of my application?</p>
<p>I would love to just look at a few essays to see how you:
A. Conveyed the importance of the event
B. Made the reader feel(I’ll try to see how I should make a reader feel when I finally write mine)</p>
<p>Your essays must show your love for science. As long as you make the reader feel that “yes, this kid really loves science and/or math” then you did a good job.</p>
<p>The rest depend entirely on your writing style. I wrote mine as if I was telling a story, but other people have described how much they loved it when they did research, other people answered why they loved science, how it made them feel, etc. </p>
<p>Try to make yours you. You should feel look at college essays to see examples of good writing, but not to style your own essay on. Caltech doesn’t expect many of its students to be great writers, so what they’re looking for instead is for your love of science to shine through.</p>