Admissions Essay Ordeal: The Young Examined Life - New York Times - 14 views
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filled whole grocery bags with crumpled efforts at expressing his adolescent essence in 500 words or less.
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Jenna Frowein on 12 Sep 11This is actually kind of creative and poetic.
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And though they seem to have more collaborators than ever before
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''No adult is ever asked to do that.''
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I think it's cool that they ask us to do this, write about what makes us unique, and adults don't do it. I think it's kind of like a test to find yourself and who you are; when that happens, you are ready for college, I guess.
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But most students going into college don't know who we are yet. We often apply undecided becuase we don't know what we want to be. I think part of the college experience is finding who we are. Maybe writing the essay is the first step.
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'I wrote about racism toward myself
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This is the season of that excruciating rite of passage that requires college-bound seniors to take what has often been a blessedly uneventful existence and transform it into something extraordinary, intriguing, distinctive.
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"Few students are as lucky as Chris Bail [...] When I was about 11 or so, a group of kids threw stones at me, and that stuck in my head. That was just a big, big experience for me, and I guess I'm really lucky to have that because I know kids that are writing about, like, concerts they went to and stuff like that.'' I am disturbed greatly. What does not kill us will only make us stronger... Scary thought: Students trying to get into college will take extremes for more interesting topics to write about. What if it happens? Pressure. It exists. But don't let it RULE or RUIN your life.
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Don't we all have some special experience in our lives, it's just that we need to look for them.
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As many students across the world struggle to individualize themselves on paper in order to get into college, they often write about drastic situations that they often think are unique only to them. This however is not the case as these situations have also happened to thousands of other students and the people reading over the essays probably already have read something like that. The only true way to express yourself in your paper is to just write how you normally would instead of hyping yourself up, using big words that you normally would never use in an attempt to seem smart, or blowing your achievements out of proportion to what they really are. Just be your self and let your voice shine through your paper.
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I find it quite sad that students will go to the extremes and seek something that they think admissions officers will find intriguing rather than it coming from their gut and what is important to them. In my opinion the best advice I could give to someone writing their college essay is, be yourself. Don't try to be someone you're not.
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"And though they seem to have more collaborators than ever before, from cooperative English teachers to new Web sites that offer successful essays for sale, the competition seems tougher than ever, now that so many early applicants have whittled the number of available slots." To me the college application is sounding more and more deceptive. By the time you take that raw essay written by purely yourself and it goes through multiple English teachers and websites, and other peers, it goes from your writing to like your teacher's writing. I feel that after all of the processes it goes through, all the people who review it, the finished product really doesn't show the college who YOU are.