Whether your intellectual idea or experience concerned libertarianism, or radical feminism, or art history, remember your essay is about you, not art or politics. Rather that burbling on about how Ludwig von Mies’ analyses or Germaine Greer’s revelations or Rembrandt’s brush strokes are so great, talk about how they changed you. And as this is an essay for Stanford, they better have changed you into someone passionate about the life of the mind.