Your opinion needed!

Applying to College
1

One of my short answer questions asks me to describe an idea I find intellectually interesting. My dilemma: I find almost EVERYTHING intellectually interesting! Would any of the following make an interesting essay no matter who read it?

– female/male differences, why don’t they understand each other?
– Efficiency- traffic, DMV, etc. (how whenever I’m stuck in line I try to figure out how it could be more efficient, I could talk about city planning, physics, math, government, a whole bunch of issues, looking at the same situation from many different viewpoints)
– Popular science, interaction between science/the outside world
– Consciousness
– Interaction between neurons and how we think, can we ever hope to understand/model this?
– History, what makes a civilization successful? What allows it to prosper? What allows intellectual ideas to flourish? Why was Athens so successful? What did they have that allowed them to have all these great minds that essentially served as the philosophical foundations of the Western world? Or was it all Alexander the Great?
– Does science influence us and thus our scientific thought, or is scientific thought based around human interactions? Are connections between the two purely coincidence?
– Karma, ups and downs, spiritual thoughts, can it all be explained with logic? maybe it’s all an issue of semantics, not some mysterious force guiding us
– why is it that so much interests me? why is it that so few people like math? how can I make math more bearable-- maybe even interesting/exciting-- for people, talk about research I’ve been doing in cognitive science

So, do you like any of the above ideas? Let me know if any of them aren’t clear. Thanks SO much for your input!

2

<h1>1, #2, #7, #8 -- I think those are the more interesting/original ones that can be dealt with in 250 words format.</h1>

3

<p>Well, most of those sound very interesting, but you said "short" essay, which I'll assume is about 250 words. Which means you don't want the topic to be too broad, or you'll never fit it in. </p>

<p>I wouldn't do the "consciousness" one, simply because you didn't give your angle on it. And I would forget the "History" one, it's overworked in history classes. Too much scope for a short essay. But the others look pretty good.</p>

4

<h1>2 sounds interesting!</h1>

5

<p>I like #2 and the last one as essay topics. The other ideas are interesting, but are too hard to tackle in a short composition. Some topics, like the differences between men and women, are infinite in complexity; a high school student's perspective would only emphasize his or her limited experience.</p>