WSJ turns the table on college presidents

[whatever4]

<p>I found it funny that several essays focused on topics that kids are told are over-used and thus “no-no’s” in college essays: overseas jaunts (Cairo, South Africa, Zambia) and death (a brother … a chipmunk). </p>

<p>Also, some writers used too many big words. The writers should have been more cognizant about whether whoever was reading these essays would think someone else had ghost-written them.</p>

[sorghum]

<p>…bat not ball …</p>

[PRUNEFACE]

<p>WSJ is owned by the company that owns Fox News. It is unfortunate, becasue their political pieces used to be as good there other ones until election season came about.</p>

[coureur]

<p>From the Carleton essay:</p>

<p>“Here’s what I learned. That people are people, that the world around most people are friendly and helpful and come swiftly to the aid of those lost.”</p>

<p>Oww, that’s making my stomach hurt. Isn’t “I went abroad and discovered that people are the same everyhwere” supposed to be the most hackneyed and unoriginal essay topic ever?</p>

[Endicott]

<p>What a great idea for an article!</p>

[midmo]

<p>

Isn’t “I went abroad and discovered that people are the same everyhwere” supposed to be the most hackneyed and unoriginal essay topic ever?

</p>

<p>In the 11th grade I was dismayed to have an English assignment returned to me with the words “cliche, cliche, cliche” written across the top–in red. Too bad Mr. Nieburgh wasn’t reading some of these.</p>

[calmom]

<p>I agree on that Carleton essay. Ouch!</p>

[Youdon_tsay]

<p>I read the essays of the presidents at two colleges ds is considering. Uh, not impressed.</p>

[nngmm]

<p>

Here’s what I learned. That people are people, that the world around most people are friendly and helpful and come swiftly to the aid of those lost. Something more, something equally important, something which with me has stuck, I learned. I learned that life is an adventure and that that best course through life is to approach all of life as an adventure.

This sounds to me like a quote from a book “What You Should Never Write in a College Assay”…</p>

[PRUNEFACE]

<p>some are just painful… Better than some of us could write though… I know I’d be a failure hahaha</p>

[MarathonMan88]

<p>I’d give the merit scholarship to Michael Roth of Wesleyan for his essay on the influence of the brother who died before he was even born. The prose is direct, simple, and far less contrived than that in most of the other essays; more important, the sentiments really ring true, as if this were not the artificial exercise that we all recognize it was. (But maybe I’m just a sucker for sentiment.)</p>

[bethievt]

<p>However, I’ve travelled all over the world and the greatest thing I’ve learned is that people are just people. It’s amazing to go to India and Thailand and Japan and Greenland and Russia and the United Arab Emirates and Nepal and Kazakhstan and Ukraine and Kenya and just about anywhere and experience this oneness. Hard to put it into words though. I think another thing you can count on is that most of us love our fellow primates–and elephants.</p>

[calmom]

<p>

I learned that life is an adventure and that that best course through life is to approach all of life as an adventure.

I so hate redundancy …</p>

<p>Then it gets worse:

Thus placed into context, getting lost is an adventure from which we can learn uncommon and uncommonly important life lessons. In college, in college courses, far from home and family and familiar, comforting faces, I’m sure to get lost again. But if I see college as an adventure and if I see getting lost as part of the adventure, then the learning which I long for college to be will come the more swiftly, the more certainly.

(another use of “life” to add to the previous three iterations – and three more instances of “adventure” on top of the first two, plus 3 repetitions of the phrase “getting lost”. And would it be possible to come up with more stilted phrasing than the final sentence?</p>

[curious77]

<p>I think we parents are a bit angry at these college presidents who put our children through this arduous application process that is filled with vauge “rules and requirements” that no one can possibly meet. And the proof of that is these essays. What garbage. I would like these essays submitted to the admissions committees and see what they have to say about the “applicant”.</p>

[nngmm]

<p>^ When I first saw the article, that’s what I thought WSJ was going to do - check if they can get accepted into their own schools…</p>

[fendrock]

<p>well done, bethie, well done! - mentioning the elephants was a nice touch.</p>

[calmom]

<p>Actually, I had no problem with my kids writing the essays. It was kind of fun… it’s just that my kids did so much better.</p>

<p>Then again, it appears that my daughter ended up in the right college…</p>

[epiphany]

<p>

Isn’t “I went abroad and discovered that people are the same everyhwere” supposed to be the most hackneyed and unoriginal essay topic ever?

</p>

<p>Hmm. I could have never been accused of thinking, let alone writing, such a thought. Because I went abroad (later, at 22) and discovered that people are delightfully different everywhere, but certainly different from my fellow citizens of the time. They were wonderfully formed by and in their cultures.</p>

<p>Call me weird.;)</p>

[idad]

<p>To what extent do this essays mirror each school’s campus culture? After visiting a couple on this list, I would guess there is some correspondence.</p>

[yupaka]

<p>What do you think about this essay (the author is Dean of Admissions at the University of Chicago):

In the spirit of those questions Mr. O’Neill loves, The Chronicle asked the dean to write an essay of his own on Tuesday. He was kind enough to compose a response to Option No. 3 on Chicago’s current admissions application.
Essay prompt: A writer does well if in his whole life he can tell the story of one street. Chicagoans, but not just Chicagoans, have always found something instructive, and pleasing, and profound in the stories of their block, of Main Street, of Highway 61, of a farm lane, of the Celestial Highway. Tell us the story of a street, path, road — real or imagined or metaphorical.

Let me see? Which street? This is kind of a setup for any Chicago kid, especially so for any lover of Nelson Algren, and of his streets on what to me, sout’ west sider that I am, was the unknown and unloved North Side. There will be a Nelson Algren birthday party in a few weeks, and I remember the first of those, long ago, but also long after Algren left Chicago, angry, to move to Paterson, N.J., to research the murder trial of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. The neighborhood ladies, in beehive hairdos, were the sponsors of the party, which was held each year on Division Street, in the Bob Shop, which, once I became worldly enough to go north, was one of my favorites. The proprietor, Kate Smith, introduced us to the music of the genius Ken Vandermark, and so much more neo-bop, and of course, was always open to a party, hence the Algren birthday celebration (Algren lived around the corner on, I believe, Evergreen). So we would file in, and give the Polish ladies (people thought Algren was Polish because of the neighborhood he lived in and the characters in some of his best stories, but he was Swedish, and he had a grandfather who was a self-proclaimed rabbi) our $5, and listen to French gypsy jazz bands and Simone de Beauvoir, Nelson’s sometime lover, impersonators. This year the party will be held in the Steppenwolf Theater, and Matt Damon will be there … this is what Algren wrote about in his little book Chicago: City on the Make. Chicago literature is a literature of nostalgia, streets, and the story of loss and decline. Of course, there is no reason to write more about Division Street, because Studs Terkel has already done it. And Saul Bellow and Isaac Rosenfeld and the Tuley High bunch, with Nietzsche or Aristotle in their pockets, told stories on and about Division Street, their do-wop the spontaneous translation of “The Waste Land” into Yiddish. And not much is left, anyway, that is, left in the Chicago sense of as it was in the lost good old days. The Russian Baths are still on Division Street (read about them in Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift), and until they turn into condominiums, you can still go to the banya, though the last time around we were given anejo tequila in a fancy bottle instead of borsht and vodka with our massages. After the soak, the bar Zakopane is still there down the block, and the conversation is still in Polish, so it is not as if Chicago has made it all the way.</p>

<p>Studs, of course, leads me straight back to the South Side and Studs Terkel’s namesake, Studs Lonigan, and his creator, James T. Farrell. He was the one who actually walked my streets, and, more or less at the same time, the streets of my father. Once when I was still a kind of graduate student, working for the College of the University of Chicago, a friend of mine working in the university’s development office was assigned to pick up James Farrell from the airport, what my father and Mayor Daley both always called O’Hara. The real Farrell, who was my dad’s, and my, nearly favorite author. He was back for the dedication of a stained-glass window in Rockefeller Chapel installed in honor of Teddy Linn, the English teacher who inspired Farrell to write the first story about the character who would become Studs Lonigan. My friend arranged for me to meet the author as he walked from the Quadrangle Club to the bookstore to buy a new typewriter ribbon for the novel he was writing — his 70th, or so — as he traveled. He signed my paperback copy of one of his Danny O’Neill novels, A World I Never Made, and we talked, and I asked him about Algren. He told me how he once saved Algren — maybe he even said he saved Algren’s life — when he was threatened by some CPA thugs (Farrell was a Trotskyite by then, and Algren was a more orthodox communist who had, apparently, strayed). He said some nice things about Algren’s writing, at its best, and then we talked about the White Sox, which he loved, and I loved, and, as it turned out, Algren loved. I came to know later, and this is such a relief, that Algren himself started on the South Side, around 71st Street, and he moved north to the land of the Cubbies. In one of his stories he tells about moving to the new North Side neighborhood and going out to play ball, and when each kid took the identity of his favorite Cub, Algren was asked who he was, and he could only think of White Sox — by then, Black Sox. That is the kind of mistake you don’t make on our streets without paying the price.

</p>