University of Chicago Essay Prompts for 2015-2016: Crazy and Crazier

Or not.  I like U Chi’s  approach to essays and appreciate the challenge they throw down, and even if their prompts are sometimes pretentiously self aware of cleverness more than they are truly clever, they do open a window of fresh air into the stale halls of the college application essay.  If you need some help with getting into the spirit of things, just chant, “U Chi is to the application essay as Stanford is to the marching band.

One thing you can count on with Chicago is some latitude–the off-the-wall essay is more welcome here than anywhere else–but keep in mind that the usual warnings about being a whiner or offensive still apply. You are still writing to a human audience, and you still need to consider their response to you. And hey, even the Stanford marching band, where “anything goes,”  has discovered that not everything does go.  Same goes for the U Chicago essay.  You still need to use some judgment about how you look on paper.  And conduct some due diligence investigations before you write, otherwise known as research.  More about that below.

Directly below I splice in the U Chicago essay prompts, to save you opening multiple windows–under the prompts, I will begin discussing how to address some of them, including that wonderful new option of choosing an essay prompt from past years to write about.  Here are the prompts, followed by Part I of my analysis:

2015-16 UChicago Supplement:

Question 1 (Required):

How does the University of Chicago, as you know it now, satisfy your desire for a particular kind of learning, community, and future? Please address with some specificity your own wishes and how they relate to UChicago.

Question 2 (Optional):

Share with us a few of your favorite books, poems, authors, films, plays, pieces of music, musicians, performers, paintings, artists, blogs, magazines, or newspapers. Feel free to touch on one, some, or all of the categories listed, or add a category of your own.

Extended Essay Questions:

(Required; Choose one)

Essay Option 1.

Orange is the new black, fifty’s the new thirty, comedy is the new rock ‘n’ roll, ____ is the new ____. What’s in, what’s out, and why is it being replaced?
—Inspired by Payton Weidenbacher, Class of 2015

Essay Option 2.

“I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.” –Maxine Hong Kingston. What paradoxes do you live with?
—Inspired by Danna Shen, Class of 2019

Essay Option 3.

Joan of Arkansas. Queen Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Babe Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Mash up a historical figure with a new time period, environment, location, or occupation, and tell us their story.
—Inspired by Drew Donaldson, Class of 2016

Essay Option 4.

“Art is either plagiarism or revolution.” –Paul Gauguin. What is your “art”? Is it plagiarism or revolution?
—Inspired by Kaitlyn Shen, Class of 2018.

Essay Option 5.

Rerhceseras say it’s siltl plisbsoe to raed txet wtih olny the frist and lsat ltteres in palce. This is beaucse the hamun mnid can fnid oderr in dorsdier. Give us your best example of finding order in disorder. (For your reader’s sake, please use full sentences with conventional spelling).
—Also inspired by Payton Weidenbacher, Class of 2015. Payton is extra-inspirational this year!

Essay Option 6.

In the spirit of adventurous inquiry, pose a question of your own. If your prompt is original and thoughtful, then you should have little trouble writing a great essay. Draw on your best qualities as a writer, thinker, visionary, social critic, sage, citizen of the world, or future citizen of the University of Chicago; take a little risk, and have fun.

Essay Option 7.

In the spirit of historically adventurous inquiry, to celebrate the University of Chicago’s 125th anniversary, please feel free to select from any of our past essay questions.

College App Jungle Advice and Analysis on the U Chicago Prompts for 2015-2016 Part I

Things not to do in the U Chicago essay:

No true confessions of your darkest thoughts/fears/desires

No whining

No begging

No plagiarism

No (obvious) bragging

Remember:  they do not really know you. There will not be any body language for them to see, no nudge-nudge, wink, wink to convey that you are kidding; they won’t see you outside of the data and activities reported and the essays that you send–as with all college applications, you are a kind of holograph arising from a few screens of words and numbers.  So “honesty” and “being yourself” are hedged terms, even here, and even here you are crafting a self to present to an application reader.  Just ask this:  which of your selves would you let into college?   And then show that self, with maybe a shot of extra zany thrown in.

Things to consider doing:

Research.   You may not end up actually including any new information learned from research in your essay, and in fact your essay should not read like some plodding and serious piece of research, but doing some research helps frame things and may give you some ideas on how to be creatively weird (instead of factually correct and/or boring).  Doing research is always advice I give for the Chicago prompts, which inevitably have some kind of scientific or intellectual background, even when they intentionally warp it, and this is  especially true this year, because Chicago is taking us into the Wayback machine with their last essay option, above, which I repeat here:

Option 7: In the spirit of historically adventurous inquiry, to celebrate the University of Chicago’s 125th anniversary, please feel free to select from any of our past essay questions.

When you click on the past essay questions, you will see that the first option they offer from their past questions is option 2 from last year, what I call the Sapir-Whorf question.  I wrote extensively about this prompt last year, so if you like it, give my commentary a  read before you dive in:  Writing About Option 2 from 2014: Sapir-Whorf.

See what I mean about framing things through research?  This was such a meaty question that I wrote a second post on it, in which I gave more specific suggestions for responding:  Sapir-Whorf Part II.

This example shows why I like the UChi prompts—-yes, you could simply due a non sequitur riff on the question without knowing anything at all, but knowing something helps a lot.

I would also point out that even the non sequitur in comedy depends on knowing what the sequitur is–in other words, if you do not know what is right or customary, you do not know when the comedian is intentionally getting it wrong.  In most cases, comedy appeals to what is broadly known or accepted, as when Steve Martin does a riff on Side Effects.   (Am I dating myself by name dropping this master of nuvo-Dada?  Probably)

So keep in mind, wiseguys and humorists:  Knowing up from down is important if you want to make down into up.

I have written about a number of other interesting prompts from U Chicago in the past, so in keeping with this post’s emphasis on research, you might look at those while you are waiting for my next post on this year’s U Chicago essay prompts:

The Heisenberg Prompt

The Mantis Shrimp Prompt

I think that is enough due diligence for now.  Stay tuned for my next post on U Chicago, and let me know if you need editing–three rounds of editing on single U Chicago essay starts at $160, ready to submit if you follow my editing.  Serious inquiries only, lest your e-mail be converted to processed, canned pork product.  Until next time,

Cheers.

WordGuild

University of Chicago Application Essay Prompt Two: You Wanna Schroedinger’s Cat? I Got A Schroedinger’s Cat.

If the title of this post on Chicago’s application essay, prompt two, seems obscure, let’s first take a look at the prompt itself:

Essay Option 2.

Heisenberg claims that you cannot know both the position and momentum of an electron with total certainty. Choose two other concepts that cannot be known simultaneously and discuss the implications. (Do not consider yourself limited to the field of physics).

Inspired by Doran Bennett, BS’07 Chemistry and Mathematics.

While the prompt allows and even suggests that you write about fields outside of physics, it is still helpful to know a bit more about the background to this prompt.   This might help you better identify an analogue, and if not, at least you have a better idea of what Heisenberg was talking about. In this post, I’ll give you the scientific context to the prompt, with both Hiesenberg’s idea and Schroedinger’s response, with links that offer detailed explanations that are easy to comprehend (with a little effort).  I will also discuss the genre of this prompt and errors that this prompt may lead you into, with an example.    I’ll end with some humor.

Background and Context of the Prompt:  Physics

Let’s unpack this prompt a little more and give it some context, as we did with the first U of C prompt.  The concept outlined in this prompt is usually called Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.  You can find a good explanation of it on a number of websites.   This page on PBS gives a brief summary of the problem and Heisenberg’s proposition:  Heisenberg on PBS.  This next site also offers a quick and clear explanation, but offers much more detail about the mechanics of the idea; those of you with a mathematical aptitude will appreciate the annotated explanations of the math associated with the observations.  Go here to have a look:  hyperphysics.

Another good place to look is on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, here.  In addition to concluding that you cannot know an electron’s position and momentum, Heisenberg also proposed that the path of an object comes into existence when we observe it.  Think about that, for awhile, and you may come up with a number of analogous ideas to write about.  For more on this and on quantum physics, along with some biographical dirt, go here: Quantum Mechanics 1925-1927.

As for Schroedinger’s Cat.,  Schroedinger, in response to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, proposed a thought experiment to illustrate the problem uncertainty raised.  Let’s just say that Schroedinger was not thrilled with uncertainty, and then . . .This post continues with a link to Mr. Schroedinger’s cat, then examines the genre of this prompt, after which it explores some problems you should consider before addressing this prompt.  If you like this post so far, you can access it as well as other protected or sample information on this blog by choosing one of the two options I explain below.  Future posts also fully available only to subscribers or clients will include analyses of prompts from Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton and other elite universities. 

How to get full access:  If you wish to subscribe, e-mail me at the address below; you will set up an account with WordPress, and I will give you access to my private blog until April of 2013, after you pay a subscription fee of 15 dollars.  Alternatively, you can send me an essay for a free edit and review sample; if you decide to retain me for editing services, you will automatically get access to all of my protected material.

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