<p>“To balance the playing field, I think admission folks need to go back to schools to. If some uber smart, engaging kid did the app himself flawlessly they ding him for being too professional ? First they try to separate the chaff from the whey, now they are saying the cream of the crop is staged. So your goal is medicine and you volunteer your summer to help the sick in some field hospital in Kenya, that’s considered staged, passionless ?”</p>
<p>This all goes back to supporting your claims. The kids who get in are the kids who write good essays about the experience. If you read the essay of a kid who actually has been moved by whatver he has done, it is a completely different experience. Dry admission techniques, like having perfect stats, dont accomplish anything other than making you ‘competitive’ - if you put down some Kenyan mission service thing and dont explain how it moved you, you just plonk it on your resume and hope for the best, it is a dry admission technique. If you write about it well and persuasively, then it will be a valuable admission tool.</p>
<p>I understand that from an admissions officer’s point of view, they want to see the “true” applicant, warts and all, but that’s not for the benefit of the applicant. It’s for their benefit in weeding out and winnowing down the pool. The equation is entirely different from the point of view of the applicant. For an applicant it’s no different than applying for a job that you really want. You study up on the employer and the availaable position and you prepare a targeted resume that highlights those things that make you a good fit for the job and explain or deemphasize those that dont. This just be yourself and you’ll get into your dream school stuff is idealistic. Unfortunately, it’s also pure crap. I would agree however that cookie cutter, professional essays are a waste. In addition to being dishonest, these almost never involve the research that is needed to market you the way you need to be marketed.</p>
<p>I completely agree with mia that colleges manipulate you into thinking you know the right strategy when you dont, but that being said, while the colleges motives for their ‘be yourself’ aren’t because they are all warm and fuzzy, humanization is a key element in an application. All the things colleges tell you form a good 50% of the things to do to get in. </p>
<p>you have to take what colleges tell you and pull it another step. Okay, look, myself sucks, but that’s why I created an alter ego that did do all of the things I did with passion and intellectual vitality - and then you ‘be that person’ on the application. </p>
<p>"“The secret of acting is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” Exactly. Since the college app, in my opinion, is wrongfully focused on your personal life and things that you should do without any consideration of college, I see no harm in pretending to care and pretending to be all uber-active-community-humanity-involved. Some people would say that if yourself sucks, then you dont deserve HPYS, but what people think your merit is > your merit.</p>
<p>Totally spot on. The thank-you notes that some colleges are recieving are getting rediculous. Just step back for a second and think, “If I were an admissions director, would the quality and professionality of the thank-you note my interviewer recieved impact my chances of getting in?”</p>
<p>I do not have a clue about semicolons, but my son’s college essay was about his non-perfect teeth. And yes alll colleges accepted him to the tune of $375,00 total merit aid.</p>
<p>lol, i hate semicolons. i am obsessed with commas. </p>
<p>i’m doing my Common App essay about a service trip to a 3rd world country, so i guess that’s a ‘cliche’ topic, except that i’m actually from that country and i can relate it too myself… i’m definitely going to use that to my advantage so i can stand out</p>
<p>You may think that it is all the over-achievers with perfect scores that get admitted, because that is, in large part, the population of this forum. However, once you GET to these schools and make friends, you learn that many of the matriculating students do NOT have anywhere near perfect scores or even perfect GPAs. I’ve met many students now that attend selective universities- both the ones my kids attended and others. There are many that, by CC standards, would be considered very average applicants.<br>
Sure- if you form your application into what you think the AdComms want- a perfect high school student with no glitches, no discipline problems and many hours of community service- you have a shot at admission. It’s not the best shot, though.</p>
<p>I am a HUGE fan of the semicolon. I wouldn’t say that I use them excessively, but my college essays all have a few in them. My parents aren’t allowed to read my essays :)</p>
<p>One of my favorite pieces of literature has always been William Faulkner’s “The Bear”, especially chapter 4 (one long passage totaling more than eighteen-hundred words and spanning several pages incorporates quoted matter and several paragraphs yet contains no periods nor capitalization to indicate the start and end of sentences). Would an Admit be willing to accept an essay written as such, even if the student had a love of Faulkner equal to mine, explained such as inspiration for his/her essay and wrote well to boot?
As far as third world countries, I guess kids down here have it made. You don’t even have to leave the country to experience third world conditions and there are tons of opportunities to help correct these conditions.
On a different note I have been proofreading college essays for current seniors and and dismayed at the lack of passion for anything I have seen in so many of them.</p>
<p>If you want to take a peek behind the curtain at what admissions officers are really looking at these days to fill their classes consider this from the Dean of admissions at Tufts. You can be who you are as long as who you are is different:</p>
LMAO I read through my EA application to MIT for the first time ever today and discovered my essay had turned into something pretty much like this (only with fewer words)…uploading from Word ended up obliterating all my punctuation and turned the thing into a formatting disaster.
…I got in anyway, though. :P</p>
<p>THIS IS SO IMPORTANT. i was just accepted to vassar ED1 and im sure the queerness of my application definitely helped. for example, i thought about how many people must staple the pages together. instead, i clipped mine together with paper clips in the shapes of feet. also, i pasted some polaroids of myself with captions in empty places. my common app essay was about how all of my fears of growing up were like tadpoles swimming in this pool beneath my feet, “squirming between my toes,” and how my favourite neighborhood coffee house helped aleviate those fears. in my “why vassar” essay i wrote about quidditch and how i wanted to play so badly. </p>
<p>alot of things like this will help more than you know.</p>
<p>nmath, that was all very creative! I am sure that your stats helped, as well as your willingness to matriculate to Vassar from Lousville! Congratulations!</p>
<p>“Sure- if you form your application into what you think the AdComms want- a perfect high school student with no glitches, no discipline problems and many hours of community service- you have a shot at admission. It’s not the best shot, though.”</p>
<p>Unfortunately, for my HS junior, we’ve come to realize she has a very poor shot: a high-achieving, well-adjusted, non-deprived, non-traumatized WASP; for her whole life, a kid every parent wanted to take home, every coach wanted to clone, and every teacher appreciated. (her parents do know how lucky we are—and that it was luck).</p>
<p>As a result, for the schools she aspires to, she’s a dime a dozen. So, she’s toast . . . . unless hers is the stair chosen the day the applications are tossed down . . . .</p>
<p>^ agreed. I’m a hs senior and I feel like, at this point, why is it SO HARD to take me? It would literally be a miracle to take me because i"m overrepresented in the pool, in terms of sex, geographic area, etc, etc even though I have great SATs (2250), SAT IIs (800, 750), APs (5’s), community service, awards (National Merit, essay contests, language exams), editor in chief, and varsity captain. It gets to the point of who is the most ‘unique’ or ‘edgy’: I’m none of those things! I’m just glad that I did my activities for myself…it’s a harsh reality to work for 4 years, spending every weekend doing stuff (even when it’s not so fun/easy), and then get not get accepted because of things you couldn’t change!</p>
<p>Besides, this article really annoyed me. Oh, so now you DON’T want perfection? Interesting, interesting. Getting annoyed about thank you notes? Really? The nerve of a thank you note!</p>
But you’ve got it exactly backward – the “flawed imperfect self” is exactly the part that brings the essays to life. My daughter wrote a short answer on her favorite artist by admitting that she had discovered the painter through calendar art (“doesn’t everybody”-- and that she liked the paintings because the subjects looked like her. She answered a favorite fictional character question by reference to a children’s picture book. </p>
<p>Though she emphasized her interest in studying a particular foreign language in her applications, and had lived and studied abroad to better learn the language – her essay was about what a tough time she had with the language, some of the stupid gaffe’s she made while trying to communicate, and how she had to learn to rely more on body language to communicate while living abroad. In other words-- she got ahead by admitting how weak her foreign language skills were, not by bragging about how strong they are. </p>
<p>This wasn’t feigned – it was self-revelatory and honest. My d. had A’s in her high school foreign language class, but passing high school courses, even on an AP level, is no comparison trying to function and attend school in a country where the language is spoken. So she didn’t hurt her application by admitting how frustrated she was – rather, she revealed a lot about how she responded to a challenge. </p>
<p>Her applications were funny, charming, humorous – she reserved more serious statements for short answers to questions that were specific as to her educational goals or reasons for choosing a certain course of study. </p>
<p>Yes, the top colleges want strong students – but that information should come to them through high school transcript and recs. What they want from the essays is a sense of the student’s personality – if you focus on trying to convey how smart and accomplished you are, then you’ll tend to come off as one-dimensional or arrogant. </p>
<p>My daughter got into a bunch of highly selective schools where her SAT scores were below median, in the bottom quartile. When I see a comment like this, as well as the Wall Street Journal article, it gives me a good sense why – I think of applicants probably knock themselves out of the running by trying to hide behind a caricature of what they think the college wants, rather than confidently revealing their own selves.</p>
<p>Most of what is posted here is naive. Do you really think of the adcoms as the true arbiters of what the institution is about? Most couldnt get into the schools that employ them. More importantly they do what they do with little or no input from the faculty or trustees, many of whom are appalled by the focus on “interesting” backgrounds and the relative lack of emphasis on objective criteria.</p>