Not going to disagree with you there. Even if it’s 25%, or 10% - and almost any political essay will rub 10% of a school’s readers the wrong way - why take a 1-in-10 chance of offending your reader no matter how well-written your essay is?
Any hijacking of this thread was unintentional.
These are both wrong, and wrong in an especially funny way. The hijacking of the thread, such as it was, occurred because @Zinhead, a vocal conservative, was so aggressive in claiming that Stanford was full of liberals who would penalize an applicant for being a conservative. Everyone here who actually knows something about Stanford – for instance, I went to graduate school there, my sister is an active undergraduate alum, and I have or had various friends on the faculty – would tell you that shows a complete misunderstanding of Stanford’s culture. If you write something stupid and unintellectual, you will get penalized for being stupid and unintellectual, whether you are liberal or conservative. The bias against stupid, unintellectual people at Stanford runs much deeper than any political leanings.
For pretty much exactly that reason I would not worry about finding anyone in the Stanford admissions office who thinks Obama is a muslim. Or is a strong Trump supporter. Like it or not, you can pretty safely disregard those possibilities. Of course, you might get a superficially more sympathetic reading from an Obama-hating Trumpster, so you may not think that’s such good news. If you stick with a political topic, I would definitely advise you not to pitch your essay such that your ideal reader would be a Trump fan. That ain’t happening.
Whatever you decide to do, “play it safe with your essay” is terrible advice. Before April Fool’s day, Stanford is going to reject 96 or 97 of every 100 people still applying there, most of whom will have great academic credentials. Playing it safe is a perfect way to get yourself into the fat part of the bell curve, which is not where you want to be.
@Consolation and I have given you very similar advice, I think.
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.
@JHS - The Stanford culture that you speak so highly of produced a system in which Obama outraised McCain by a 82:1 margin. Forgive me, but I find it hard to believe that an organization that produced such a one-sided political result is capable of objectively analyzing a libertarian essay without dismissing it out of hand.
Note that McCain’s fundraising totals in 2008 were closer to Ralph Nader’s (who I just found out was a candidate in '08) than they were to Obama’s.
In any case, who’s to say that the political donations of faculty are an accurate indicator of the faculty’s leanings. The numbers involved are small enough that a single Democratic bundler could easily account for the 82:1 skew.
Even if that’s the case, I wouldn’t want to attend a school where professors can’t take a competing viewpoint seriously. I’d still be cautious about political essays, but I doubt Stanford is a bastion of intolerant Democrats, Republicans, Know-Nothings, Whigs, Democratic-Republicans, Free-Soilers, or any other political movement you care to name.
+10 points for the Heinlein reference!
“Nothing uses up alcohol faster than political argument.”
Edit: By the way…
Was I the only one that read that and had the mental image of a group of professors running around wearing adult diapers? I was the only one? …ok :-"
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
This joke was old when I was 14 years old.
a) It’s funny
b) It’s true
c) It dates all the way back to 2009.
It sounds like a field of rattlesnakes here with the rattling about this thread is doing. Sorry for the further derailment, but I just have to reply to post #17.
I don’t see why this is relevant at all. Whether or not it’s true, I don’t see why it matters. It’s supposed to be freedom of religion here. Being Muslim shouldn’t be anything to be accused of or ashamed about. It’s just that the extreme Muslim terrorists are getting out of hand and no one seems to be able to do anything about it. I’m hoping someone comes up with a good solution, but I’m still waiting.
What is the percentage of people who think the President is a Muslim, and also think being a Muslim is nothing to be accused of/ashamed of? I’d guess that percent is zero.
I think the implication is that many Trump supporters assume our first black president can’t be a good Christian like the rest of them, just as Trump himself needed many years and several copies of his birth certificate to accept that the same president really was an American.
I find Trump supporters more scary than the man himself. One uninformed man can be blamed on his upbringing. A million say something about our schools.
You can say that again.
Sorry Zin, but I believe that even dogged Republican faculty refused to send a dime to McCain once his choice of running mate was made public. McCain is an honorable man who had done many fine things for this country, but the choice of a “heartbeat away from the presidency” divisive politician who was uninformed, under-educated, dismissive of intellectuals, dismissive of life experience which differed from her own, and unable to read and analyze complex information meant that McCain’s support among college professors was spiraling downward after the convention.
I know die-hard conservatives who sat home that year rather than vote for Sarah Palin as VP- as much as they liked and admired McCain. Law of unintended consequences- but I know a lot of Republicans and they take their philosophical grounding and intellectualism seriously. Nominating someone whose life experience and intellectual depth mirrored a reality show on Bravo was not the way to get that faction of the party interested in writing checks to McCain.
To the OP, I don’t think it’s wrong to write a political essay but (no offense) your topic sounds boring and generic. I’d pick a different one.
Over 60 per cent of the Trump supporters also think Obama was not born in the US. Sometimes Hawaii does not feel like the rest of the US to me.
Bernie Sanders has raised money from over 2 million people. Most republicans get their money from a few big money donors so using ratios is not a meaningful statistic.
I think the essays help define you as a person and should be used to show your passion. e.g if your passion is physics writing about how exciting you thought QFT was might be appropriate.
When my kid did their Stanford essays a couple of years ago one of the questions was what historical event do you wish you could have witnessed. Their answer was The Catch. That has a lot of historical significance for the bay area and Stanford and helped to define them as a person.
@suzy100 @Consolation
I may not have been to clear on this but my essay focus is more about me moving away from accepting old creeds/cultish ideologies (regardless of one’s beliefs) and becoming more of a skeptic. I was going to use my reservations with the NAP (something that’s supposed to be the foundation of the ideology) as the catalyst that began this development. I didn’t really push to promote any libertarian principles or policies, I just acknowledged that I tend to embrace their principles and I was concerned this could hurt me.
In a complete non-surprise, this thread didn’t last one minute before people couldn’t stick to simply giving the OP their own opinion, but instead had to go after other members for their opinion. With little hope of things changing, the thread is closd. @LordBendtner, I think post #15 by @suzy100 sums it up well.