<p>Hi, everyone</p>
<p>EA has just passed, and the excitement burns. What hooks / ECs / awards did you put in the app that were special and UNIQUE? How would you differentiate yourself among the thousands of applicants?</p>
<p>Hey, is there any point in "differentiating" yourself? If one has some awards, that's great, but my opinion is that you just have to be born to go to MIT (: They appreciate your personal qualities and I have an impression that awards are not so important.</p>
<p>What do you mean by "born to go to MIT" ?</p>
<p>I think s/he means that MIT looks for certain qualities within people... not just statistics, awards, or ECs. Obviously, the ECs are a part of the applicants... but MIT tries to picture the person as a whole.</p>
<p>I said that I like research, and I describes the way I think, which I made to look unique. </p>
<p>Is describing how you think unique?</p>
<p>I wrote an essay that was more or less about how I think, so I guess it's not unique for either of us lol. I wasn't really going for unique though, I was just going to covey who i am.</p>
<p>O yeah I just thought of this.</p>
<p>I remember last year when I was a junior one of my friends who applied to a school twas telling me about one of her essays. She said she wrote about her shoes. Naturally I asked y she wrote about that. She said she dindt know, she just thoguht it would stick out because it was about something odd and random. Personally, I think this is stupid. The opint of the essays are to give the adcom a better picture of who you are, not ramble about something you think will catch their attention.
Not that being unique is a bad thing. I just don't think going out of your way to be unique that is not true to who you are is stupid.</p>
<p>I have a shrine of Rubik's cubes...
This was my for-fun essay.</p>
<p>WorrieMom: LesOs wrote exactly what I mean.</p>
<p>Yeah, my essay was about my deathly fear of shower curtains and how I overcame it. I really, really liked how it turned out. I'm using it for all my schools except UChicago. Beyond the ECs, scores, and whatnot, the essays really are the only part of your application through which you can really reveal yourself to the adcom.</p>
<p>Admittedly, I have no idea where this came from on CC, but I wrote this quote on a post-it and it's been on my computer monitor for the last month:</p>
<p>
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... the most scrutinized part of the application will be the essays.
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</p>
<p>If anyone knows where that came from, feel free to post it. Anyways, I just tried to make sure that my essays were somewhat funny, memorable, and hooked the reader from the first line. It's the only way you can really stand out from the hordes if you're not a a Nobel laureate or CEO.</p>
<p>My essay was literally the thoughts that went through my head during a very stressful ten or twenty seconds.
I didn't try to sound philosophical, or make any grand conclusions about my life... those always sound contrived and pretentious to me. Instead, I simply tried to get across how I think, and what I think about. I liked the way that it turned out. =)</p>
<p>I think my main hook was the essays. They came out relatively funny, natural, and insightful (nothing like the joke essay I posted earlier that got deleted, 'kay :P). But I've convinced myself I'm going to get deferred, so whatever.</p>
<p>Well I think that an essay does not make you special. It's what you do that makes you special. Your essay is of course, just a flimsy piece of paper or a collection of bits, and it pales in comparison to what you've actually done with your time.</p>
<p>
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EA has just passed, and the excitement burns. What hooks / ECs / awards did you put in the app that were special and UNIQUE?
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</p>
<p>Hmm...things that were probably unique or close to it in the applicant pool:</p>
<ul>
<li>Work with the Kentucky ACLU Education Committee</li>
<li>Springboard diving judge in a kids' league</li>
</ul>
<p>I had a number of awards, and plenty of other ECs, but I suspect none of them were anything like unique in the applicant pool. Being a back-to-back AP State Scholar might have been close, since there are only 100 AP State Scholars in the country each year.</p>
<p>The essays do help differentiate you, because each person's are different. But I think that trying to write about the most unique thing possible, for the purpose of being unique, is usually tantamount to shooting yourself in the foot. You can write a really good essay, that really does show a lot about you and make you stand out, with a common topic.</p>
<p>Does that mean we should write on common topics? What if our ways of thingkings are different? What if we express these thinkings (eg: Relating rice to life) on our essays? They are unique. Would writing how rice and life are similar hurt applicants?</p>
<p>I think the problem is not writing an essay about something unique just to be noticed or writing about something common to avoid that issue. When writing the essay, you should see if it truly describes you and conveys your thoughts, not about whether it is something unique or common. I bet that adcoms will know very well if you chose the topic of your essay just because you wanted it to be original.</p>
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Does that mean we should write on common topics?
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<p>No, it means that you should not write on a unique topic <em>for the sake of being unique</em>. If you have a unique topic that would make a good essay, then by all means write about it.</p>
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Would writing how rice and life are similar hurt applicants?
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</p>
<p>The problem I see with certain essays like this is contrived cleverness and an excess of Special Snowflake mentality. If you can avoid this, or other problems that will make your essay annoying, then no, the topic itself won't hurt you.</p>
<p>i'm a urm. i'm a girl. and i wrote my pleasure essay about guitar hero.</p>
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i'm a urm. i'm a girl. and i wrote my pleasure essay about guitar hero.
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<p>None of these is particularly unique in the student population, and probably not in the applicant pool either. ;)</p>
<p>Good example of a good pleasure essay topic, though.</p>