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College Advising, Superb Application Essay Development

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  • Ladies and Gentlemen, Start Your College Essays: The Prompts for 2015-2016 are Ready and Waiting

    Or at least some of them are, and I will post the major prompts available as of July 6th, 2015, below this short introduction to college applications for 2015-2016.

    For two of the major systems used by West Coast students and many others, the news is good–the Common App has tinkered with its prompts in a way that improves them, and the U.C. system will not change its prompts at all, so you can start these essays any time.   And you should, in my opinion, start very soon if you mean to apply to the 10-15 colleges that are on the average applicant’s list these days.

    A word of caution, however:  Just because the prompts are up does not mean that the application portals/websites are live.  The Common App, for example, posted its new prompts in a blog post, but if you went on the Common App site early to register and fill in all those irritating boxes of information that are required to set up an account, your diligent efforts will have been for nought–the Common App site will go offline on July 26 and all information on it at that time will be erased. Including yours, if you already set up an account for the 2015-2016 application cycle.  When the site comes back online–supposedly on August 1st, and we trust the Common App people have learned their lesson and will be reliable this year–you can open your account.

    Your takeaway:  Expect many essay prompts to be release before application portals are up and running, and go ahead and start your essays, but hold off on setting up accounts for now.  And when in doubt, check with a reliable source, like Yours Truly.

    Confused by this?  Let me explain:  updating websites costs money and diverts resources. Despite better economic news and so better funding in most states, the public schools are not flush with money–in California, Prop 30 stabilized funding but did not restore it to the levels prior to the economic crisis that started in 2007-2008–and the U.C. system is in relatively good shape, compared to other systems around the country.

    This quote from University of California President Janet Napolitano, from this past spring, sums up the situation for most large, public schools:

    “Public universities require public support. On a per-student basis, the state is paying far less than it did in 1991 – from about $18,000 in 1991 to $8,000 today, in 2014-15 dollars. The university is receiving $460 million less in funding from the state than it did in 2007, even as it educates thousands more California students.”

    Most schools and application portals leave their old stuff up until a date (un)certain because it is cheaper and creates fewer headaches (for them) than creating an interim page between application cycles.  As for  the insanely well-endowed schools who could easily afford to create more transparent application pages, why should they spend money that their competitors are not spending?  They just follow the herd, for the most part, and keep the change.

    So expect the majority of  schools to open their application portals August 1st, this year–while separately and unevenly rolling out parts of the application that you will need to complete, like the essays.

    So go ahead and get started on any of the essays below–I will make this experience easier later this week by creating in-page links to speed the process, but for now scroll down to see your schools of interest.

    Here is a list of  most of the major prompts currently available; scroll down below the list to find the full prompts and requirements:

    Common Application–Choose one of five prompts and write your single C.A. essay.

    Georgetown University–Four essays, varying lengths.  Clearly a commitment required to apply here, people.

    University of California–Write two essays of up to 1,000 words. I suggest doubling one of them with the Common App.

    University of Chicago–One required essay, one optional.  You should write both.  500 words each.  I have multiple posts on past U Chi prompts, and one option is to choose an old prompt to write about.  Check out more on that by searching my site.  Wild and wacky.

    University of Michigan–250 word essay, then a 500 word essay for Freshmen and a 500-word essays for transfers.

    University of North Carolina–a Common App essay and a second supplemental essay of 400-500 words

    University of Pennsylvania–a Common App essay and a supplemental of similar length addressing your academic interests and the school you will apply for–majors are situated within specific schools in universities, like Engineering, Arts and Sciences, etc. Plan on doing some clicking and researching here.

    University of Texas, Austin–Two essays required and a third optional essay encouraged (by me–when in doubt, write more, but do so with a clear strategy).

    University of Virginia–Common Application essays plus two shorter essays and other responses.

    University of Washington–Write an essay of 600 words, a shorter essay of 300 words and a couple of (optional) short essays.

    Full Essay Prompts and Guidelines:

    Common Application Essay Prompts, 2015-2016

    From the Common App blog, updating for this year:

    We are pleased to share the 2015-2016 Essay Prompts with you. New language appears in italics:

    1. Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.
    2. The lessons we take from failure can be fundamental to later success. Recount an incident or time when you experienced failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?
    3. Reflect on a time when you challenged a belief or idea. What prompted you to act? Would you make the same decision again?
    4. Describe a problem you’ve solved or a problem you’d like to solve. It can be an intellectual challenge, a research query, an ethical dilemma-anything that is of personal importance, no matter the scale. Explain its significance to you and what steps you took or could be taken to identify a solution.
    5. Discuss an accomplishment or event, formal or informal, that marked your transition from childhood to adulthood within your culture, community, or family.

    University of California Essay Prompts

    Personal statement

    Your personal statement should be exactly that — personal. This is your opportunity to tell us about yourself — your hopes, ambitions, life experiences, inspirations. We encourage you to take your time on this assignment. Be open. Be reflective. Find your individual voice and express it honestly.

    As you respond to the essay prompts, think about the admissions and scholarship officers who will read your statement and what you want them to understand about you. While your personal statement is only one of many factors we consider when making our admission decision, it helps provide context for the rest of your application.

    Directions

    All applicants must respond to two essay prompts — the general prompt and either the freshman or transfer prompt, depending on your status.

    • Responses to your two prompts must be a maximum of 1,000 words total.
    • Allocate the word count as you wish. If you choose to respond to one prompt at greater length, we suggest your shorter answer be no less than 250 words.

     The U.C. essay prompts

    Freshman applicant prompt

    Describe the world you come from — for example, your family, community or school — and tell us how your world has shaped your dreams and aspirations.

    Transfer applicant prompt

    What is your intended major? Discuss how your interest in the subject developed and describe any experience you have had in the field — such as volunteer work, internships and employment, participation in student organizations and activities — and what you have gained from your involvement.

    Prompt for all applicants

    Tell us about a personal quality, talent, accomplishment, contribution or experience that is important to you. What about this quality or accomplishment makes you proud and how does it relate to the person you are?


     Georgetown University Application Prompts, 2015-2016

    Georgetown University Question #1

    Required for all applicants

    Indicate any special talents or skills that you possess.

    Georgetown University Question #2

    Required for all applicants

    In the space available discuss the significance to you of the school or summer activity in which you have been most involved.

    Georgetown University Question #3

    Required for all applicants

    As Georgetown is a diverse community, the Admissions Committee would like to know more about you in your own words. Please submit a brief essay, either personal or creative, which you feel best describes you.

    Length

    Approximately 1 page

    Georgetown University Question #4

    Required for all applicants (based on particular school)

    APPLICANTS TO GEORGETOWN COLLEGE: Please relate your interest in studying at Georgetown University to your goals. How do these thoughts relate to your chosen course of study? (If you are applying to major in the FLL or in a Science, please specifically address those interests.)

    APPLICANTS TO THE SCHOOL OF NURSING & HEALTH STUDIES: Describe the factors that have influenced your interest in studying health care. Please specifically address your intended major (Health Care Management & Policy, Human Science, International Health, or Nursing).

    APPLICANTS TO THE WALSH SCHOOL OF FOREIGN SERVICE: Briefly discuss a current global issue, indicating why you consider it important and what you suggest should be done to deal with it.

    APPLICANTS TO THE MCDONOUGH SCHOOL OF BUSINESS:  The McDonough School of Business is a national and global leader in providing graduates with essential ethical, analytical, financial and global perspectives. Please discuss your motivations for studying business at Georgetown.

    Length

    Approximately 1 page

     

    University of Chicago Essay Prompts. Et Al

    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:

    ((From U Chicago FAQ: Is there a word limit or suggested word limit to your essay responses?

    We suggest that your essays stay around 500 words each. While we won’t as a rule stop reading after 500 words, we cannot promise that an overly wordy essay will hold our attention for as long as you’d hoped it would. Please be kind to your poor admissions counselor, who reads 1,000+ applications per admissions season, and stick to our suggested limits.))

    (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.

    University of Michigan Essay Prompts

    U-M supplemental essay questions for the 2015-2016 Common Application:

    Essay #1 (Required for all applicants. Approximately 250 words.)

    Everyone belongs to many different communities and/or groups defined by (among other things) shared geography, religion, ethnicity, income, cuisine, interest, race, ideology, or intellectual heritage. Choose one of the communities to which you belong, and describe that community and your place within it.

    Essay #2 (Required for all applicants. 500 words maximum.) FRESHMEN APPLICANTS

    Describe the unique qualities that attract you to the specific undergraduate College or School (including preferred admission and dual degree programs) to which you are applying at the University of Michigan. How would that curriculum support your interests?

    Essay #2 (Required for all applicants. 500 words maximum.) TRANSFER APPLICANTS

    Describe the unique qualities that attract you to the specific undergraduate College or School to which you are applying at the University of Michigan. How would that curriculum support your interests?

     

    University of North Carolina Essay Prompts

    2015 Application Essay Prompts

    After much discussion among the admissions committee, we’ve now selected the essay prompts for the 2015 application. We hope they will inspire you to write an essay that will help us understand who you are, how you think, and what you might contribute to the University community. Keep in mind that your essays will be evaluated not only for admission, but also for possible selection for merit-based scholarships and Excel@Carolina.

    First-Year Applicants

    You’ll submit two essays, the first of which is from the main part of the Common Application. These prompts are common to all schools who accept the Common Application and you can view both the prompts and instructions here.

    The second essay will be specific to the UNC application. You’ll choose one prompt and respond in an essay of 400-500 words. Here are the questions:

    1. Why do you do what you do?
    2. You were just invited to speak at the White House. Write your speech.
    3. What one thing should all students know before their high school graduation?
    4. What concerns you about your world? What do you hope to do to make it better?
    5. UNC Professor Barbara Fredrickson – an expert in positive emotions – has defined love as “micro-moments of connection between people, even strangers.” Tell us about a time when you experienced a “micro-moment of connection.” What did you learn?

    University of Pennsylvania Essay Prompts

    Penn Writing Supplement on the Common Application for Fall 2016 entry:

    How will you explore your intellectual and academic interests at the University of Pennsylvania?  Please answer this question given the specific undergraduate school to which you are applying.

    The essay should be between 400-650 words.
    *For students applying to the coordinated dual-degree programs, please answer this question in regards to your single-degree school choice.  Interest in dual-degree programs will be addressed through those program-specific essays.

    Coordinated Dual Degree and Specialized Program Essay Questions for 2015

    Huntsman: The Huntsman Program in International Studies and Business

    1. In light of your personal interests in language, business, andinternational affairs, please discuss a current global issue and explain how the Huntsman Program would allow you to explore it in greater depth. (500-700 words)
    2. Please indicate how many years and how extensively you have studied the language you selected for the Huntsman Program.

    LSM: The Roy and Diana Vagelos Program in Life Sciences and Management

    LSM seeks students who are enthusiastic about combining science with management. What excites you about this combination? What advantages and opportunities does the combination provide, and what does it address? Be as specific and original as possible in addressing these questions. (400-650 words)

    M&T: The Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology

    Please complete both prompts.

    1. How will the Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology help you pursue your specific interests in both engineering and business? Please address in depth engineering fields, areas of business, and their potential integration that you plan on pursuing through this Penn program. (400-650 words)
    2. Please describe a time in which you displayed leadership. (250 words maximum)

    NHCM: Nursing and Healthcare Management

    Discuss your interest in nursing and health care management. How might Penn’s coordinated dual-degree program in nursing and business help you meet your goals? (400-650 words)

    VIPER:  The Roy and Diana Vagelos Integrated Program in Energy Research

    Describe your interests in energy science and technology and your previous experiences (academic, research, and extracurricular activities) that have helped you to appreciate the scientific or engineering challenges related to energy and sustainability. If you have previous experience with research, consider describing your research project at a level appropriate for an educated non-expert, outlining the goals, hypotheses, approach, results, and conclusions. Describe how your experiences have shaped your research and interests, and how the VIPER program will help you achieve your goals. (400-650 words)

    NETS:  The Rajendra and Neera Singh Program in Networked and Social Systems Engineering

    Describe your interests in modern networked information systems and technologies, such as the Internet, and their impact on society, whether in terms of economics, communication, or the creation of beneficial content for society. Feel free to draw on examples from your own experiences as a user, developer, or student of technology. (400-650 words)

    Seven-Year Bio-Dental Program

    • Please list pre-dental or pre-medical experience.  This experience can include but is not limited to observation in a private practice, dental clinic, or hospital setting; dental assisting; dental laboratory work; dental or medical research, etc.  Please include time allotted to each activity, dates of attendance, location, and description of your experience.  If you do not have any pre-dental or pre-medical experience, please indicate what you have done that led you to your decision to enter dentistry.
    • List any activities which demonstrate your ability to work with your hands.
    • What activities have you performed that demonstrate your ability to work cooperatively with people?
    • Please explain your reasons for selecting a career in dentistry.  Please include what interests you the most in dentistry as well as what interests you the least.
    • Do you have relatives who are dentists or are in dental school?  If so, indicate the name of each relative, his/her relationship to you, the school attended, and the dates attended.

    University of Texas Application Essay Prompts and Supplemental Writing (Including Plan II)

    The Essay Prompts for Fall 2015 Applicants

    All essays, scores and documents that are submitted to the University of Texas Undergraduate Admissions via mail or electronically submitted via BeALonghorn (which is the preferred method of submission) will be visible to all honors programs and colleges to which the applicant has applied.

    Essay C (required of all UT Austin applicants):

    • Considering your lifetime goals, discuss how your current and future academic and extra-curricular activities might help you achieve your goals.

    Essay of Choice:

    Application to Plan II Honors requires submission of Essay C and either Essay A, B or D.  Plan II will review the same two essays the applicant submits to complete application to the University of Texas at Austin.  There are brief additional writing requirements that are part of the honors application, but there is not another essay required. The applicant does not submit multiple versions of Essay C and Essay A, B or D.  Plan II Honors and the University of Texas Office of Admissions review the same essays.

    • Essay A: Describe a setting in which you have collaborated or interacted with people whose experiences and/or beliefs differ from yours. Address your initial feelings and how those feelings were or were not changed by this experience.
    • Essay B:  Describe a circumstance, obstacle or conflict in your life, and the skills and resources you used to resolve it. Did it change you? If so, how?
    • Essay D:  Submit this essay if you are applying to architecture, art history, design, studio art, or visual art studies/art education.  Plan II will accept Essay D, along with Essay C, as one of the two required essays.
      Personal interaction with objects, images and spaces can be so powerful as to change the way one thinks about particular issues or topics. For your intended area of study (architecture, art history, design, studio art, visual art studies/art education), describe an experience where instruction in that area or your personal interaction with an object, image or space effected this type of change in your thinking. What did you do to act upon your new thinking and what have you done to prepare yourself for further study in this area?

    Please be sure to read what Plan II says about essays.  That information CAN make a difference to your Plan II evaluation.

    Special Circumstances Essay Topic:  Essay S:  There may be personal information that you want considered as part of your admissions application. Write an essay describing that information. You might include exceptional hardships, challenges, or opportunities that have shaped or impacted your abilities or academic credentials, personal responsibilities, exceptional achievements or talents, educational goals, or ways in which you might contribute to an institution committed to creating a diverse learning environment.

    *Special Note on Essay S:  Essay S should NOT be used simply as another opportunity to submit a third writing sample, to emphasize interest in the program or to demonstrate motivation to be part of Plan II.

    Letters of recommendation, as well as the optional “Essay S” are NOT required by Plan II and really should only be submitted if the circumstances warrant submission.  We actually prefer that applicants do NOT write a third essay or submit letters of recommendation unless there is a compelling reason to do so.  If the applicant has to ask if he or she has special circumstances, then the answer is no.  The same is true with letters of recommendation.

    In most, although not all, special circumstances that would indicated that the applicant should submit an “Essay S” or obtain a letter of recommendation would include some kind of challenging situation in the family, personal life, health, family financial or personal experiences—circumstances that are out of the ordinary high school student’s experience (which might include, but certainly are not limited to the loss of a family member, major family crises/upheaval and/or family financial issues; immigration issues; an applicant’s or an applicant’s family member’s health issue that affected the family; moving multiple times throughout the student’s lifetime, especially multiple times during high school; a parent deployed in the services, etc.).

    Special circumstances that warrant an “Essay S” submission or a letter of recommendation could certainly also include special beneficial circumstances such as educational travel experiences, a special school experience (charter school, home school, performing arts school, health professions high school, etc.) research experiences, work or internship experiences that give the applicant a different perspective, qualification, maturity etc.

    Requirements on the Honors Application:

    The Plan II Honors writing requirements on the on-line honors application include the 5 sentences we consider your Personal Statement.

    If an applicant is applying to more than one honors program, all the requirements for each honors program will be contained in the single honors application.  The application will NOT submit multiple honors application, even if applying to multiple honors programs.

    The Plan II Personal Statement

    The applicant completes the following short answer prompt in the required on-line honors application.  The on-line honors application is accessible once the applicant has completed and submitted the ApplyTexas application and it has uploaded into the system.  The applicant will receive a confirmation email from the university when ApplyTexas has uploaded successfully.

    • Please write five sentences describing yourself, your life, and your experiences that taken together form an accurate view of who you are.  Be creative!

    Do not list information provided in your résumé or in your essays.  This is not a rehash.

    These five sentences should be little nuggets of information that give us insight into who you are.  It’s information that you couldn’t work/sneak into an essay or onto your résumé, but information you feel is really important in showing us just who you are, “where you come from” and how you are “Plan II-ey.”  The sentences should not simply reiterate information from your résumé, but they may enhance information mentioned on your résumé.  Smart applicants will make good use of this little “application gift,” and make each of the five sentences about something different.

    Think of these sentences as showing us “FACETS” of who you are, including what you do, what you love, your favorite things, your deepest desires, your most grandiose dreams…..  These are snapshots, not short stories, that give us a view of you and your unique perspective.  What five important things would you want to make sure you were able to include if you were in an interview for Plan II.  (Since we do not offer interviews as part of the admissions process, this is your big chance.)

    • Please number the sentences 1 through 5.
    • The personal statement has a maximum 1000 characters total.  Spaces DO count as characters in the 1000 limit.  But our honors application pages are very flexible when it comes to character limit. We don’t have a very strict character count system so if the applicant goes over the limit, our system will retain a good quantity of characters past the 1000 limit, to a certain point. If the applicant is worried about the limit, we advise the applicant to type as many characters as he/she needs and press the “save” button before submitting. If the applicant goes over the limit, our system will cut off the extra characters and the applicant will know it.  On the other hand, if after pressing the “save” button all the characters appear, then he/she knows that all the characters will be transmitted.
    • From the Plan II Honors admissions point of view, these should not be long and wordy.  These are NOT meant to be “short paragraph” sentences.
    • If you use more than 1000 characters, you are probably going on too long.  You do not have to be especially pithy or clipped.  But if you drag these sentences out, you are not helping yourself.  We have already seen many applicants who have made wonderful use of this opportunity in well-under 1000 characters.

     

    University of Virginia Application Essay Prompts

    2015-2016 First Year UVA Application Essays

    Towards the end of every reading season, we gather to talk about which essay questions elicited great responses, which ones could be tweaked to be better, and which essays we’d like to retire. We often pull students into our discussions to get their perspectives. There are some questions on our application that prompt students to write interesting essays year after year, so we don’t feel the need to change them. Conversations we have at Days on the Lawn and other admitted student events sometimes come into play as well.

    You’ll write one essay for the general Common Application and then you’ll write two short responses to these prompts along with other questions that are specific to UVa. The Common App folks posted the main essay questions a while ago. Here are ours:

    2015-2016 First-Year Application Essay Questions

    1. We are looking for passionate students to join our diverse community of scholars, researchers, and artists.  Answer the question that corresponds to the school/program to which you are applying in a half page or roughly 250 words.
    • College of Arts and Sciences – What work of art, music, science, mathematics, or literature has surprised, unsettled, or challenged you, and in what way?
    • School of Engineering and Applied Sciences – U.Va. engineers are working to solve problems that affect people around the world, from our long-term water purification project in South Africa to continuing to research more efficient applications of solar power. However, most students start small, by using engineering to make a difference in daily life. If you were given funding for a small engineering project that would make your everyday life better, what would you do?
    • School of Architecture – Describe an instance or place where you have been inspired by architecture or design.
    • School of Nursing – Discuss experiences that led you to choose the School of Nursing.
    • Kinesiology Program – Discuss experiences that led you to choose the kinesiology major.
    1. Answer one of the following questions in a half page or roughly 250 words.
    • What’s your favorite word and why?
    • We are a community with quirks, both in language and in traditions. Describe one of your quirks and why it is part of who you are.
    • Student self-governance, which encourages student investment and initiative, is a hallmark of the U.Va. culture. In her fourth year at U.Va., Laura Nelson was inspired to create Flash Seminars, one-time classes which facilitate high-energy discussion about thought-provoking topics outside of traditional coursework. If you created a Flash Seminar, what idea would you explore and why?
    • U.Va. students paint messages on Beta Bridge when they want to share information with our community. What would you paint on Beta Bridge and why is this your message?

    A note about word limits:
    We aren’t counting words on these. The word limits are there so you know that we are expecting short statements, not term papers. The boxes where you paste in your essay will cut you off at some point, but there is a little bit of leeway. Be concise and thoughtful in your statement statement and try to convey your voice and style in your words. This is the one spot on your application where your personality gets to shine, so don’t treat this like a formal school assignment.

     

    Vanderbilt University Application Essay Questions

    Please briefly elaborate on one of your extracurricular activities or work experiences. (150-400 words)

    University of Washington Essays and Short Responses 2015

    The Writing Section is a required and important part of your application for admission.

    A. Personal Statement (Required)

    The Personal Statement is our best means of getting to know you and your best means of creating a context for your academic performance. When you write your personal statement, tell us about those aspects of your life that are not apparent from your academic record. Tell us about the experiences that don’t show up on your transcript:

    • a character-defining moment,
    • the cultural awareness you’ve developed,
    • a challenge faced,
    • a personal hardship or barrier overcome.

    Directions

    Choose either A or B. Maximum length: 600 words.

    1. Discuss how your family’s experience or cultural history enriched you or presented you with opportunities or challenges in pursuing your educational goals.

    OR

    1. Tell us a story from your life, describing an experience that either demonstrates your character or helped to shape it.

    Tips

    • Some of the best statements are written as personal stories. We welcome your imaginative interpretation.
    • You may define experience broadly. For example, in option B, experience could be a meeting with an influential person, a news story that spurred you to action, a family event, or something that might be insignificant to someone else that had particular meaning for you. If you don’t think that any one experience shaped your character, don’t worry. Simply choose an experience that tells us something about you.

    B. Short Response (Required)

    Directions

    Choose one of the following two topics and write a short essay. Maximum length: 300 words.

    1. The University of Washington seeks to create a community of students richly diverse in cultural backgrounds, experiences, and viewpoints. How would you contribute to this community?
    2. Describe an experience of cultural difference or insensitivity you have had or observed. What did you learn from it?

    Tip

    • You may define culture broadly in Topic #2. For example, it may include ethnicity, customs, values, and ideas, all of which contribute to experiences that students can share with others in college. As you reply to this question, reflect on what you have learned — about yourself and society — from an experience of cultural difference.

    C. Additional Information About Yourself or Your Circumstances (Optional)

    Directions

    Maximum length: 200 words

    You are not required to write anything in this section, but feel free to include additional information if something has particular significance to you. For example, you may use this space if:

    • You are hoping to be placed in a specific major soon
    • A personal or professional goal is particularly important to you
    • You have experienced personal hardships in attaining your education
    • Your activities have been limited because of work or family obligations
    • You have experienced unusual limitations or opportunities unique to the schools you attended

    D. Additional Space (Optional)

    Directions

    You may use this space if you need to further explain or clarify answers you have given elsewhere in this application, or if you wish to share information that may assist the Office of Admissions. If appropriate, include the application question number to which your comment(s) refer.

    E. Activities & Achievements (Required)

    Directions

    Using the grid provided below, identify up to five of your most significant activities and achievements during grades 9-12. In a few bullets or sentences, indicate your contribution.

    Maximum length: 50 words for each activity.

    You may include activities, skills, achievements, or qualities from any of the following categories:

    • Leadership in or outside of school-e.g., athletics, student government, cultural clubs, band, scouting, community service, employment
    • Activities in which you have worked to better your school or community
    • Exceptional achievement in an academic field or artistic pursuit
    • Personal endeavors that enrich the mind, e.g., independent research or reading, private dance or music lessons, weekend language/culture school

    Format for the Writing Section

    • Content as well as spelling, grammar, and punctuation are considered.
    • If you’re applying online, compose in a word processing program such as Word, then copy and paste into the windows provided. Double-spacing, italics, and other formatting will be lost, but this will not affect the evaluation of your application.
    • We’ve observed that most students write a polished formal essay for the Personal Statement yet submit a more casual Short Response and Journal of Activities & Achievements. Give every part of the Writing Section your very best effort, presenting yourself in standard, formal English.
    • Proffreed, proofreed, PROOFREAD!

    Tip

    • Write like it matters, not like you’re texting. This is an application for college, not a message to your BFF. Writing i instead of I, cant for cannot, yr for you’re: not so gr8.

     

     

  • July, 2014 Update On College Admissions Essays (With Current Listing of Available Essay Prompts)

    Update and How to Use this Blog

    First a caveat: my blog has detailed entries on college admissions going back about five years, at this point.  My current policy is to keep most of my posts up, as a kind of archive of college application information and also because there are only so many essay types that the colleges can offer. Certain kinds of prompts show up every year, and in many cases, I have already written about the prompt type.  This kind of analysis continues to be useful.

    I mention all of this because I can see what people are reading on my blog, and there are a number of you, Dear Readers, who are reading last year’s essay prompt from, for example, the University of Chicago, on the mantis shrimp (Note:  unlike the NSA, I do not see your metadata, cannot access your e-mails, am not storing information on you, and can only see the number of people who look at my posts, per day.  So no, I am not spying on you.  I just know, in aggregate, what you are reading.)

    I think the mantis shrimp  is a fun prompt, and if I do say so myself, my  post on the mantis shrimp is also informative and high-quality; it just doesn’t have anything to do with this year’s University of Chicago essay prompts.  I have started discussing this year’s Chicago’s essay prompts in the two posts that precede this one, so have a look at those here:

    U Chicago Essays 2014-2015: Post One on Essay Prompt Two

    U Chicago Essays 2014-2015: Post Two on Essay Prompt Two

    We are currently in the 2014-2015 application cycle, so use caution when visiting college admissions websites–at least for the next two weeks (I am writing this on July 21st, 2014; August 1st, 2014 is the date most app sites go live, with this year’s prompts and information).  Only a limited number of universities have so far posted this year’s prompts, or have confirmed that they will be retaining this year’s prompts–look below for more on these.

    On the other hand, I have dozens of old posts on topics like writing about books, or on how application essays are evaluated or on how to write essays that don’t look like the typical, boring, five-paragraph essay format taught in high school.  These posts are still useful, so they should be read, by anybody who has to deal with an essay on a book or idea that interests them, or who wants to know how essays were and still are evaluated, or who wants to write a good essay that isn’t a rote exercise.  By all means, read and use posts like these; just don’t send Chicago an essay on the mantis shrimp this year.

    Developments in Application Portals–Universal vs. Common App

    The 900-Pound Gorilla Tag-Team of College Admissions includes Naviance and the Common Application.  This is due to the large number of colleges using both, and the fact that Naviance currently operates in coordination with the Common Application.  This tandem has become somewhat controversial, partly because it starts to look like a racket when so many students are directed to third-party organizations when they apply to college–organizations that take a cut of application fees–and partly because the Common Application web portal was such a disaster last year.  I hasten to add that I am sure the Common App people have their act at least somewhat better organized this year, but the trouble last year went on, literally, for months, and forced a number of big-name colleges to extend application deadlines.  In a way, this actually benefited some students, who were able to keep working on essays and other information, but at the cost of considerable stress.

    One side effect of last year’s Common App fiasco has been an increase in the number of colleges adopting the Universal Application, which has the advantage of being simpler to use and generally easier to navigate.  Unfortunately, Naviance has not yet incorporated the Universal App into its system, and the Universal App does not have as many colleges using it as the Common App does–but many more have signed up in the last year, and I expect Naviance to adopt the Universal App by the 2015-2016 application season.  Here is an example of a college that adopted the Universal App this year:

    Published February 18, 2014

    uchicagCollege applicants next year will have more application options as the University of Chicago is joining the Universal Application.

    “We decided to announce we will join the Universal College Application for the next application year now because we want applicants, families, recommenders, and the Higher Education community to know of our commitment to providing them with an application option that is easy to use, reduces stress, and simplifies the process,” said Jim Nondorf, Vice President for Enrollment at the University of Chicago. “We have been very happy with how easy it has been to work with the Universal College Application team.”

    And here is a link to the Universal Application:  Universal Application Portal

    Getting Started Now:  Some Application Essay Prompts are Already Available

    The Common Application is using the same essay prompts this year as last year, which I will link below; some schools have posted early or are keeping last year’s prompts–University of Chicago has posted new prompts and Penn, for example, will be using last year’s prompts, so there are essays that can be worked on as of right now.  I also e-mailed Berkeley and was told that they will be using the same prompts (though, in a typical bureacratic maneuver, my contact also said that if anything changed,  I should see their website?!  Because this seemed a bit equivocal to me, I will not link the U.C. application portals yet.)

    Links to some essay prompts that are already available below:

    Common Application Essay Prompts, 2014-2015

    Penn Essay Prompts

    University of Chicago Essay Prompts

    University of Georgia Essay Prompts

    Boston College Essay Prompts

    These are all prompts for this year, which is the 2014-2015 application cycle–this is your application cycle if you are a rising senior/will be graduating from high school in 2015.

    That’s all for now.  I will be back soon with some thoughts on application trends and will be posting on a variety of essay prompts for popular colleges in the coming months.  If you need college advising or essay editing help, I am currently fully booked from roughly August 1st-15th, but will have editing slots open in the second half of August.  Good luck and good writing.

     

     

     

  • The University of Chicago Application Essays: Prompt 2, Part 2

    I gave background to U Chicago’s Application Essay Prompt 2 in my last post; in this post, I will provide some more specific suggestions and sources for essay inspiration.  Before I do, here is the prompt, again:

    Essay Option 2.

    In French, there is no difference between “conscience” and “consciousness”. In Japanese, there is a word that specifically refers to the splittable wooden chopsticks you get at restaurants. The German word “fremdschämen” encapsulates the feeling you get when you’re embarrassed on behalf of someone else. All of these require explanation in order to properly communicate their meaning, and are, to varying degrees, untranslatable. Choose a word, tell us what it means, and then explain why it cannot (or should not) be translated from its original language.

    — Inspired by Emily Driscoll, an incoming student in the Class of 2018

    Alrighty.  So my first suggestion is not to accept Ms. Driscoll’s argument that some words are untranslatable, because they are all translatable.  However, even once they have been translated, a foreign person still may not really get it.  One reason:  culture, which includes language but also history, philosophy, geography, weather, technology, etc, etc, etc.  A concept like the Chinese idea of Chi is actually pretty easy to translate but not so easy to fully understand–it can best be translated as energy but also can have to do with a person’s temperament and mood, with the weather and time of year and its influence on the person, with the “energy” or nature of food a person eats–and the chi of food alters as well, depending on the way food is cooked.  A fever manifests a disturbance in chi, but is also  a kind of chi in itself, and a martial artist of skill will use a person’s chi against him.

    Notice that much of this does not fit the western concept of energy, though electricity is a also a kind of chi.  A nonnative speaker of Mandarin can become fairly fluent in the language but would need to, for example, study some martial arts under a master, maybe do some qi gong and learn about Chinese cookery, architecture and art in order to have a decent grip on Chi, on its meanings and manifestations in Chinese thought and experience.  So looking at language as an expression of culture, and at culture as a kind of closed room that must be entered and explored before many words–many concepts–can be fully understood . . .  is a good way to approach this essay.  There are also personal and familial reasons why a person may not be equipped to understand a word–even a native Mandarin speaker may not have the understanding of Chi that, say, a Taoist master who is also an acupuncturist and painter would have.

    My second suggestion is to look at idiomatic expressions.  You might want to start with your own language, Oh Native English Speakers. Of course, given the different varieties of English, it can be argued that we Americans are speaking a foreign tongue to those Brits.  Or vice-versa.  A famous Brit whose name escapes my data banks once claimed that American speech is slang.  Contrasting the Queen’s English and the Colonies’ English is a fun exercise in itself–you can start with those slang and idioms that do translate, pairing them, then find idioms that do not translate at all; for example:

    American English/Queens English

    a dust up/argy bargy

    cock up/snafu

    biscuit or bikky/Cookie

    bobby/cop

    technical expert (or geek, in some uses)/boffin

    screwed/buggered

    opportunist, schemer or swindler/chancer

    chat or gossip/chinwag

    reconnoiter or check out/dekko

    old man or boss or old and the boss (and dreary and annoying)/gaffer

    The next step is not just to look at what the equivalent expression is, but to try to figure out why/from what the term came.  Again, notice that they are translateable, but there is a cultural flavor and flair with many slang expressions.  A good example is dekko, which is not English in origin; it comes from  British military slang and derived from the Hindustani dhek/dekho meaning “to see”. It is also less commonly decco, deccie, deek, deeks.  It is also an example of what I mean about language and culture.  The British Empire ruled over India for well over a century, and in the process of garrisoning India, it brought back more than chutney and curry. It brought back many words and forever altered British culture.   Given that many of British soldiers were also working class, you find quite a bit of this new language entering through more street or slang dialects, like Cockney, which also has a lot of Romany (these people are commonly called gypsy) words.  Like this: Put up your dukes, pal.  Look the last two words up for more.  They are Romany in origin.

    Cockney itself would be an excellent place for you to look for inspiration, though you should keep in mind that Cockney has just about died out–the last true Cockney speakers were fading away by the 1990’s, pretty much as the East End of London faded as  a stronghold of working class whites/Cockneys.  Notice how slang evolution is tied into history and slang, as well as “proper” language evolves over time.   So slang and idioms are a great source for an essay like this, and you can use the wonders of the internet to look for ideas,  making lists of words and looking for ways to connect words and concepts that say something larger about culture.

    To start working with idioms, try British slang, Cockney, and American slang as search terms and give it some time. There are many sites and posts devoted to this, and quality varies.  Make lists and double-check definitions against other sources and sites–I will provide some good dictionaries and other sources for looking up and crosschecking, below.  What makes you laugh would probably also make your essay reader laugh, which is a good thing (as long as they are not laughing at you.)

    To recap and add an example:  the history of language and word meanings, whether they are considered idiomatic or otherwise, is  a great place to look for essay ideas and content–words do change meanings over time, just as words are born and words die.  In the 13th Century, the word gay   meant bright (brightly colored), cheerful, et al.  It had nothing remotely to do with sexual orientation.  Then, in 1890’s America, it gained a slang meaning–a gay lady was a prostitute (I guess somebody was happy.)   Then, in the 20th Century, the term, which already had a double meaning associated with being happy or bright, and with suspect or illicit sex, was assigned to homosexuals, then adopted by the homosexual rights movement; but this change in meaning then led to suburban youth by the 1990’s referring to something suspect or bad as “gay” –a change that illustrates the adolescent fear of being different,  especially sexually, and conversely, of punishing those who are different.  This is an example of a  psycho-sociological effect that is reflected in the change in a word’s meaning.  Words change all the time, but not always this drastically–fear and prejudice are powerful influences, even on words.  When you write your essay, your focus might be on how the history of language is closely tied to sociology and psychology.  Our words say a lot about us.

    To close things out, I am going to recommend some source materials, and as part of that paste in a recent article that shows a good way to open an essay like this . . . Hello loyal readers.  This is the second post on this Chicago prompt, and you have to pay a subscription to my private blog to get full access to this post and quite a few other posts, past and future.  You have about half of the post available in this sample.  If this seems unfair, that’s probably because you have been taught to disrespect the value of written work, due to the parasitic nature of most of the big internet companies, which offer creators little compensation while essentially giving the creative work of others away for free.  A subscription for full access to all of my posts is available for the small price of $15.  You send me an e-mail, with the subject heading “subscription, please,” and I will send you an invoice for $15.   After you pay it, I will give you access to my private blog, which has all of my posts available in full, including the rest of this post.

    One more thing–a caveat emptor–I do not delete old posts from other application years, partly as a matter of historical record, but also because many universities repeat the same prompts, or use prompts that are similar to prompts used in the past.  If you see that a post was put up during the last application season, you need to double-check to be sure about the prompts for this year’s applications at your specific universities–we are currently in the 2014-2015 application season.  The software of this site will link “related” posts, but they are sometimes from previous years.  Be sure to visit the university website to check on application requirements and timelines for this year.

    Speaking of which, I am still accepting some college advising and application essay editing clients.  E-mail me soon to inquire and to secure a spot.  As of this writing, July 10, 2014, I am fully booked in early August, but can accept college application editing business in July and from the latter part of August on.  This will change in the coming weeks, of course,  as new clients take up existing space in my schedule, so it’s better not to wait too long.  I only have so much time. . . See you soon.

    P.S.  The ads you sometimes see below some of my posts are inserted by the WordPress people.  Allowing them to advertise allows me to save expenses on this platform, and by keeping my fixed costs down, I am able to offer not only the most effective editing service you are likely to find, I am also cheaper than all those big operations you may have heard of.  I myself do not see the ads unless I access my own site via an outside search.  If you do dislike one of the ads, please let me know at the e-mail above, and I will have a look and contact WordPress, if necessary.  Thanks.

  • The University Of Chicago Application Essay Prompts For 2014-2015: Let The Games Begin

    This post will focus on some background for the very interesting but  contradictory prompt two of this year’s University of Chicago application essays–the language prompt, probably better named the Whorfian language prompt.  This post is Part 1 of two posts on this prompt.  I will cover some background and get into a few ideas for approaching this prompt, then follow up with more specific ideas in the part II post on this prompt.  Who should read this:  Anybody applying to U Chicago in 2014-2015.

    And we are off to the races, as U Chi gets their prompts out the door. Hopefully they establish a trend with this.

    I say this because, in recent years, the Common Application has been going live right around August 1st, and increasingly, so have most universities, even those that do not use the Common Application.  This has meant that most students have not had any certainty about essay prompts or short answers or anything else until they are just about ready to go back to school for their senior year.  Students are often faced with five, ten or more essays, beginning in August.  This  has seemed odd and unfair to me, given the writing requirements for some university apps and the way most schools emphasize putting significant time and effort into application essays.  So kudos to Chicago for breaking away from the peleton, so to speak, and hopefully establishing a trend toward earlier application and prompt releases.

    And now, in the intuitively nonintuitive spirit of U Chi, let’s skip prompt one (for now) and go right to prompt number two.

    Essay Option 2.

    In French, there is no difference between “conscience” and “consciousness”.  In Japanese, there is a word that specifically refers to the splittable wooden chopsticks you get at restaurants. The German word “fremdschämen” encapsulates the feeling you get when you’re embarrassed on behalf of someone else. All of these require explanation in order to properly communicate their meaning, and are, to varying degrees, untranslatable. Choose a word, tell us what it means, and then explain why it cannot (or should not) be translated from its original language.
    — Inspired by Emily Driscoll, an incoming student in the Class of 2018

    This prompt, and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that it is based on,  represent a pretty simple idea, which is this:  the language we speak shapes how we think.  This idea is identified with a stance that is usually called Linguistic Relativism.   Beyond those basic statements about what seems a common sense idea, there is an enormous amount of debate, from whether the idea is true at all, to  whether Whorf’s ideas were hijacked and oversimplified to create a theory he would not recognize as his own. Neither Whorf nor his mentor Sapir every concocted their ideas as a formal theory in the way that, say, Einstein did.

    I add here the observation that  the way this U Chicago prompt is phrased suggests that Ms. Driscoll is really rehashing a very dated version of linguistic relativism, which is no longer really espoused in the doctrinaire way this prompt puts it, even by those who accept the basic idea.  Language reflects culture which shapes  thought, to a degree, but the idea that separable chopsticks is untranslatable is a bit silly.  I mean, you get the idea, right?  Even if it takes two words to get there?

    I think language does reflect a view of the world and habits of thought, and sure, you can do experiments with things like color and provide evidence that language shapes how we view color, but how can you separate language from culture?  Among other things.   But I quibble too early, for I have yet to provide you with some background to the theory behind this flawed but fun prompt, and I don’t want to discourage you from writing about it.  This prompt, even if it is a bit half-baked, should inspire some great essays.  I just want you to be prepared.  And at the least, this theory–and its misinterpretation–has helped supply plenty of college professors with employment sufficient to pay off their debts–or Schulden, in German, a word that also means guilt or shame–more on that later.   And now this theory offers you the chance to get into U Chicago, so I guess it’s a good thing.

    So let’s begin.  It’s always wise to know a little bit about the topic area of any essay prompt,  so here is a brief background on Whorf, then on “his” theory:

    Benjamin Lee Whorf lived from 1897-1941.  He was not originally a linguist, having studied Chemical Engineering at M.I.T.  His day job was with the Hartford Insurance Company, where he was a fire prevention engineer and inspector, and after researching  language and anthropology as a pastime,  he went on to study linguistics under Edward Sapir at Yale University.  It may seem odd that someone who did pioneering work in linguistics and anthropology worked essentially as an insurance executive, but  the avante garde composer Charles Ives was also an insurance executive,  and the poet Wallace Stevens also worked at Hartford insurance.  Maybe it’s like Flaubert said,  “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

    In any case, studying people and their languages Whorf did.  He was profoundly religious, and he started with Biblical Hebrew;  hoping to reduce the conflict between religion and science, he began to pursue what he thought were similarities between ancient Hebrew and some Native American languages.  It was while investigating Aztec that Whorf began to study under Edward Sapir at Yale.  Sapir encouraged Whorf to study Hopi, which he did.

    Whorf came to believe that the Hopi people had a whole different mental construction of the universe, and did not think in terms that an English speaker would recognize as past, present, and future. Whorf came to believe that  Hopi language and thought divided the world into what he called the manifested and manifesting.    In the first category, manifested, Whorf included  the physical universe,  and in the latter category, manifesting, Whorf included the future,  which makes sense to English speakers, but he also included other conceptual categories, like  desires, processes, power,  intelligence, and life forces. I say Whorf included these things because these are his categories, which he used to describe Hopi language.  Whorf thought that  the structure of the Hopi language itself contained a  different philosophy and view of reality than that of English speakers–so you can see the connection with the U Chicago prompt now.

    The problem lies in both Whorf’s understanding of Hopi, which now appears to be flawed, and with his view of the power of language to shape thought.  There are clear differences between Hopi and English; for example, Hopi has relatively few nouns, and tends to express  concepts that would be nouns in English as verbs. The word”wave” in English is actually a simplification of a complex phenomenon and would in Hopi be expressed in words that more or less say “plural or multiple waving occurs.”   Whorf argued that Hopi was in some ways superior to English and that the way Hopis viewed the world was in some senses better than the world view of English speakers.

     

     

    But Whorf was mistaken about a number of features of Hopi.  I add that Whorf was also one of the scholars who proposed, largely mistakenly, that the Inuit have multiple words for the single English concept of “snow.”  You’ve probably heard that old chestnut about how English speakers have only one or very few words for snow, but Inuit (eskimo was the old and not very accurate word used for these people) have literally anywhere from seven (Whorf’s number) to dozens of words for snow.  This sounds plausible until you start asking anybody who speaks English and lives in snow country or just likes skiing (Powder, corn snow, Sierra Cement. . . . ), then you realize that we have many English words for different conditions of snow, and researchers into Inuit have largely debunked these claims.

    To be fair, neither Whorf nor Sapir actually presented the ideas that bear their name as a cohesive theory, and reading Whorf, in particular, can be a bit like reading Nietzsche–what  you think he means depends on which of his works you happen to be reading and where you are in it.  Whorf is not as self-contradictory as somebody like Nietzsche, but he does present his ideas in relatively strong and  in more relative terms, and the “theory’ itself really didn’t gain currency until after Whorf’s early death.
    Here’s a brief summary of the fundamental idea, then a quote from Whorf himself  to give you the flavor, then we’ll get to the problems with a rigid application of Whorf’s ideas:
    A quick recap of the main idea of Linguistic Relativism, courtesy of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:  “Many thinkers have urged that large differences in language lead to large differences in experience and thought. They hold that each language embodies a worldview, with quite different languages embodying quite different views, so that speakers of different languages think about the world in quite different ways. This view is sometimes called the Whorf-hypothesis or the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, after the linguists who made it famous. But the label linguistic relativity, which is more common today, has the advantage that makes it easier to separate the hypothesis from the details of Whorf’s views, which are an endless subject of exegetical dispute (Gumperz and Levinson, 1996, contains a sampling of recent literature on the hypothesis).”  For more on this, have a look here: Linguistic Relativism.
    And now here is Whorf himself:
    “We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds – and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way – an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees.” -Whorf (1940:213-14)
    Despite this passage’s apparent claim that language shapes how we think, Whorf was not really a Linguistic Determinist–notice how he uses words like “largely. ”   Whorf’s  claims are limited and qualified, and this idea in the Chicago prompt that there are ideas that are  untranslateable doesn’t really hold water.
    The body of his writing shows that Whorf considered language to be fundamental in shaping thought, but that language was not the only way to think, and that the effect of language on thought was not absolute.  This is something that both his critics and the proponents of the so-called Whorfian ideas about language tend to miss, and that now brings us back to the University of Chicago Prompt, and how it is self-exploding.
    I say it is self-exploding because the examples it provides  of non-English words seem to translate pretty easily.  I think any person of high school age understands the concept of fremdschämen, of feeling embarrassed for somebody else–and while we may not have our own single English word for separable chopsticks, we all know what they are–the  phrase separable chopsticks is an admirably clear “word” for this utensil.  The French example, in which the English conscience and consciousness are the same in French is more interesting, but also not really accurate.  Based on context, a French speaker would understand very well that former president Sarkozy should (though may not, given his immense egocentricity) have a very guilty conscience for taking money from deceased former Libyan chief of state Gaddafi.
    Having said all this,  I do think there are several excellent ways to approach this prompt, despite  the apparent obliviousness of the prompt’s author to the contradictions in her prompt.  Here is one way:  language reflects culture as much as it shapes culture, and words like fremdschämen reflect a particular view of the world–you can see what is important to a culture in words like this, words which quickly allow people to identify and discuss a phenomenon or experience that may take a phrase or an involved explanation in other cultures.  The words are translatable, but the fact that a more convoluted description or definition is needed to capture the essence of a single word says a lot, both about the culture that has condensed so much meaning into a single word or phrase and the culture that has not done that.
    Which brings me back to the German Schuld, the word for guilt, shame, fault, blame and debt, among other things.  Have a look here, at my favorite online German-English dictionary for an idea of the mental landscape represented by this word:  die Schuld.
    And then consider the German response to the Euro-Crisis.  Okay, I know, this started when you were in,  like, 8th or 9th grade, but Germany  profited immensely from selling its goods on a one-t0-one monetary basis against southern countries, where German goods were significantly more expensive prior to the Euro lifting the buying power of citizens in places like Spain and Greece.  This meant a lot of profit for German companies and workers, who steamrolled southern competitors.  And German banks, who were every bit as reckless as everybody else’s banks, and most German citizens and business people, have acted as if the massive Schulden of the southern countries and the debt crisis were a huge moral failing of those Latin types (I’m representing the view of much of Germany here, not my own view), and that hard-working, frugal German citizens should not have to pay more to bail out their feckless southern neighbors.  Again, this is not my view, but this does represent the view of much of Germany.  This after massive profits and massive speculation by their own banks, which stood to lose a lot of money until Americans paid the bill.
    And while part of this is a natural reluctance to take on more debt and pain (they did a lot to reunite with East Germany, after all) some of this is also a narrow kind of moralism inherent in the culture, a not-my-problem moral prudishness which is divorced from the realities of how finance actually works, but which is clearly embedded in the moral categories of die Schulden, as you can see in a translation of the word.  Selbst Schuld (Your fault, guilt, problem), as they say.  But the Germans have some Schuld themselves, having let the U.S taxpayers bail out their banks  during the financial crisis, banks who made very bad bets on our side of the Atlantic and which should have shared the pain with us, if we follow the same reasoning that has dominated in Germany.  Our banks paid out on default swaps the German banks had on the crappy speculative bets and trash bond buys, which then helped push our banks off the cliff.  But ask a German banker or citizen, and most will say it was the other guy’s Schuld.  Denial is built into this conceptual framework, due to the moralism inherent in the term Schuld.  And we can translate this easily enough, and even share some of this way of thinking, but it’s still more heightened in the German.
    So I think the Sapir Whorf thing is a bit backwards–language affects thought, but you cannot separate language from culture, philosophy, history or psychology.  It reflects all of this, describes all of this, and both shapes and is shaped by all of this.  And I  would argue that all ideas are in some way translatable.  Whether you understand them, however, is a matter of experience–many concepts cannot really be understood only by way of words in the dictionary.
    The thing to see in language differences is how language allows some cultures to discuss some ideas, or to capture some attitudes, more easily than other cultures, and to see how this reflects an outlook on the world.  A world view.  Which is why the Japanese have a word for those disposable separable chopsticks one gets with take-out foods.  While we have plastic forks at the deli.
    My most important piece of advice on this prompt is to challenge its assumptions, but then to look at how certain word capture concepts that show habits of thought–how a culture looks at the world.  Weltanschaung, the Germans call it.  A great word, and worthy of an entire essay by itself, I might add–have a look here, if you are curious:  Weltanschauung, the biography of a word.
    Part II of this post will only be fully available on my private website, available by subscription.  I will offer some selected words and ideas to consider for this essay.  The Part II post will feature  more specific starting points to consider. It will also be available as a sample on this, my public website, which means that part of the post will only be available to subscribers, who pay a fee of $15 for access to my blog through the entire application season, from now until the end of April, 2015.  You can pay for a subscription by copying and pasting my e-mail and subject line below, and I will send you an invoice through Paypal.  Your subscription to my private blog will be activated after payment.
    To request a subscription e-mail me at:
    wordguild@gmail.com
    Subject:  Subscription.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Ivy League Round Up: The Brown, Penn, Columbia, Dartmouth And Amherst Supplemental Essays For 2013-2014.

    This will be my final update for the 2013-2014 application season.  With the early rush over, I have a few editing slots open going into the last weekend of December; if you have one or more application essays that you wish to have reviewed and closely edited, splice the following address into an e-mail and contact me with the subject “editing request:”  wordguild@gmail.com.

    Include your name, geographical location, and a basic description of what you need.  I’ll be asking you to provide me some additional information to help me edit, but all information and work is kept strictly confidential.  My prices for a three-round editing package, with the last edit ready to submit, are $100-$150, depending on the essay length and prompt.

    As for the Ivies, here we go:

    The Ivies are using the Common App and a variety of questions in their supplemental sections; what they share, beyond the Common App essays, is one or more supplemental responses that are best restated by the question “Why do you want to go to school here?”  This is a question which you can and should research.

    What you should not do is write an autobiographical incident or short essay on some experiment or program you were in–it’s fine and in fact necessary to talk about yourself and your specific  academic interests, but you should also be talking about and showing knowledge of the university itself.  Don’t just recycle part of a Common App essay.

    Things To Research For The “Why Us” Prompt

    Brown

    So let’s start with Brown as an example; their prompt is pretty simple:  Why Brown?  You probably already knew that, but my advice–again, repeated throughout this post, with some different links and information about each school– is to do some research, specifically in the areas in which you are considering majoring.  The essay should be about your experiences and interests, but not just about you.  It’s about the school as well, and not just about how the school will be useful to you.  How will you be useful in the world?  To other people or creatures or the environment?  What will your contribution be?

    Please think about that.  The admissions officer will be looking for it–it doesn’t need to be completely explicit and specific, but they won’t be impressed by an essay with a whole lot of “I’s” and “me’s” in it, or by an essay that is all about how they can do things for you.  See the Dartmouth admissions officer, below, and his comments on the self-absorbed.

    Look outside yourself.  Study the university.  Find out about programs, then about professors as well as classes.  Know something about the research or work being done at Brown in your field of interest.  Follow links and information on the work of specific professors and schools or institutes or centers.

    Be able to name drop with knowledge, but not just as a list of names the app reader already knows; this should be shown as something that fits with you and your plans, as something you can use, with a little explanation, in a meaningful way.  Be able to explain how Brown can help you achieve whatever it is you want to achieve–which hopefully has something to do with helping other people out in some way, whether through innovation or services.  Then write efficiently and without hyperbole.

    I recommend reading this article on the changes to Brown’s supplementals for this year :  Changes to the Brown Supplement.  And don’t forget to have a look at their mission statements, motto, and that kind of thing.

    Brown is one of the Ivies that views public service as more than lip service.    Don’t forget:  Sincerity is a must, but avoid being preachy or a hand-wringer, and don’t come off as self-absorbed. See my links below to how to evade the cliché, et al.

    Know What Your Major Entails/Understand the Hierarchies

    To repeat:  research all things related to your major or to areas you think you may want to major in–you hopefully have already done some research and know the basics, but a quick recap here:  Majors are taught within a  “division,” “school” “program” and/or “department” and, in recent decades also within “centers” and “institutes.” Some of the latter have different structures than a traditional school or department, but for the most part the name game with centers and institutes  is a way to set up  funding, often around one or more rock star figures (they are not always professors by trade, but possess advanced degrees and outside experience that applies to the field in question) or around some hot, usually interdisciplinary new “field.”  There is a constant turf war for attention and funding which has driven this in recent years and this also reflects developing areas of study and technology–new stuff can create new disciplines.

    Back To Brown

    One example at Brown is the department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences, formed in 2010.  How linguistics has joined Cognition and Psychology is a bit convoluted but will illustrate a point I want to make about the contemporary, interdisciplinary approach to education.

    Modern linguistics really starts in the early 20th Century, with structuralism, and was  a field within philosophy and sociology and later within various language departments.  As the early Linguistics departments were founded at universities in the 20th Century, structuralism was superseded by new fields within linguistics, like generative grammar, and today everything from probability and game theory to computer science  and brain science plays a role within linguistics  (voice recognition software, anybody?).

    The result of these developments (as well as politics and funding competition) is this new department at Brown.  It’s worth comparing majors and departmental structures at different schools–have a look at the Penn Linguistics Department, for example, which has a much less flashy website and which is embedded in a different structure– but you should also be looking at individual teachers, learning something about research and specialized programs you might be interested in, as well as about particular professors and their work.

    There are many other interesting developments over the last ten-fifteen years in “cross curricular” programs–check out the Brown sociology page, where you can see their links to things you would expect, like the Social Science Research Lab, but also their links to the program in Commerce, Organizations and Entrepreneurship.

    The message is that there is no time like the present to start defining a course of study for yourself, and these newer institutions do offer many opportunities to craft your own program and not to be stuck in a narrow field of study–this may also help you get a job.  On the other hand, I always argue that you should study what you love, and research the major that is in the area that most interests you, then look for ways to make it “practical,” if you do not want to stay in academia. An English major who can search databases with his own algorithms, for example, would be very employable; you could get there with a major in English and a minor in a computer discipline, or a minor in psychology, or sociology, or philosophy, with computer classes added to learn how to construct databases and mine data.   I’ll come back to that later.  For more at Brown, start here:

    Brown Majors, Departments and Programs

    For more ideas on things to research and write about on the “Why Us” prompt, read on.

    Penn

    Penn wants basically the same thing as Brown; here is the prompt:

    “The Admissions Committee would like to learn why you are a good fit for your undergraduate school choice (College of Arts and Sciences, School of Nursing, The Wharton School, or Penn Engineering). Please tell us about specific academic, service, and/or research opportunities at the University of Pennsylvania that resonate with your background, interests, and goals.”  400-650 words

    As with the Penn or any “Why Go To Our School” prompt, you want to drill down to find specific information–and maybe to find out what you want to do, as well.  Here is Penn’s Majors page:  List of College Majors. In one example, if you are interested in both business and international relations, you’d want to check out the Huntsman program (listed on the Penn Majors page) and start following links on the Huntsman home page:  Huntsman. The point is to become informed and follow information that interests you.

    Columbia
    Columbia has three prompts that roughly translate to “Why Us,” or why you fit them.  Here they are:
    • Tell us what you find most appealing about Columbia and why.
    • If you are applying to Columbia College, tell us what from your current and past experiences (either academic or personal) attracts you specifically to the field or fields of study that you noted in the Member Questions section. If you are currently undecided, please write about any field or fields in which you may have an interest at this time.
    • If you are applying to The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, please tell us what from your current and past experiences (either academic or personal) attracts you specifically to the field or fields of study that you noted in the Member Questions section.
    As with all of these questions, this prompt is a good place to mention a campus visit.  The people, both students and faculty,  and physical setting of the school are, hopefully, something that has influenced your decision, and this is the time to express your enthusiasm.  Specifics help, but don’t get carried away in your descriptions of the ivied walls and eager scholars.
    Back in the day, research was the purview of grad students, but these days undergrads are often involved in the cutting edge stuff– as I pointed out above, “even” an English major might be doing research, and the cutting edge there might be looking at evolving responses to a work of literature over time, Huckleberry Finn, for example, using those databases of, say newspapers and periodicals  I mentioned and writing algorithms to define searches that reveal how attitudes toward  Twain’s magnum opus have changed, or looking at the incidence of a word and how its meaning has changed, and thus engaging in a kind of English-department driven sociology.  This is quite a bit like market research, by the way, and the same basic skills can be used on other databases, looking at health in various human populations, for example.
    So what I am saying is, you could use this required app essay to start thinking in an innovative way about your own future, and you might even find a way to convince your parents that the apparently impractical subject that you love could actually be practical, after all.  With a little tinkering.
    Have a look at the research opportunities in the school of psychology at Columbia, here, and start clicking for some examples of the interdisciplinary possibilities offered in one field:
    Or go to the general research page, which has links to various fields and institutions within the university and find the sites that you need:
    Dartmouth
    As you probably know, Dartmouth uses the Common App and a College/Major specific essay.  So everything I said above about Brown, et al, still applies, but I’ll add a bonus:
    an excerpt of some quotes from an interview with a Dartmouth admissions officer, published on Business Insider; the “insider” tips offered by BI are not really anything new, and officials who are quoted as unnamed sources always have some kind of ax to grind–this guy sure offers some complaints as well as reveals some of his own biases– but his statements  on the admissions essay itself are worth perusing; here they are:

    Essays 

    “The essay is very important. It’s when you get a sense of what the kids about. We’re looking for creativity, self-awareness. The biggest mistake is when they aren’t very self-aware and write standard sports essay where they talk about the big game and that hurts them in the end. Not standing out is a big mistake for kids who are from demographic groups that are historically well represented.“

    But even an amazing essay can’t save a bad application.

    “It’s difficult to see an app like that because every aspect of the application needs to be pretty strong, especially in the numbers driven game, it’s hard for a kid to stand out if not strong academically even if he writes this amazing essay. It’s a question of the marginal case.”

    “Many kids write adversity essays. Some cases are more contrived than others. I remember one essay about a girl who struggled with a broken family in the ghetto, who lacked nuclear family structure at home. It was well-written, not case of pitying herself, but written matter of factly, very powerful.”

    “Most essays are not very memorable. I think people should be willing to take a larger risk with essays. There’s a way to do that and still be tasteful. You don’t want to highlight a negative personality trait. Like if you’re a complete narcissist, if that comes across in tone even though the essay is creative it will put off admissions officer. I do think kids need to think more about what they want to present.” (My addendum to this:  use good judgement if you want to be daring.  Many “risky” essays actuall do come across as self-absorbed or in poor taste.  So be wary of what I would call stunt essays.  Notice also that the app officer specifically liked the simply factual essay by the girl from the broken family in the ghetto.  Notice in addition that he uses the word ghetto, which sounds quaintly like what those suburban middle class kids, whom he seems to both pity and sneer at in the article, might say. Instead of ‘hood, for example.  It’s additionally interesting, because these days the “ghetto” is more a pocket neighborhood than the vast and largely, to the middle class and upward,  unknown area of a city where poor people and immigrants live.  We often have urban professionals and hipsters on the same block or a block away from what this app officer would think is a “ghetto” neighborhood.  So, he sounds a lot like an older version of the kids he seems to address most directly here.  I’m just sayin’).

    You can read more at the link below, though I hasten to add that some of this unnamed admissions officer’s complaints deserve a response from somebody, and a good journalist would have gone and asked other Dartmouth officials, on the record, for responses.  A really good journalist would probably capitalize the personal pronoun “I” as well, even in a blog format article.  Having offered those qualifications, here’s the link:   http://www.businessinsider.com/secrets-of-dartmouth-admissions-office-2012-10#ixzz2nwiWxswn

    Amherst
    I like Amherst’s supplementals the best of this bunch, so I saved them for last.  I won’t discuss all of them, but there are a couple that I think are worth looking at; here they are, so you don’t have to go back and open another page up:

    1) “Rigorous reasoning is crucial in mathematics, and insight plays an important secondary role these days. In the natural sciences, I would say that the order of these two virtues is reversed. Rigor is, of course, very important. But the most important value is insight—insight into the workings of the world. It may be because there is another guarantor of correctness in the sciences, namely, the empirical evidence from observation and experiments.”

    Kannan Jagannathan, Professor of Physics, Amherst College

    This prompt is interesting on a number of levels in its definition of what a good physical scientist is like–that’s what it is, in essence.  And since the topicc is about the workings of the world, human artifacts and ideas like ethics can also be featured in this essay.  I think the best source of inspiration for this prompt that I can give you this late in the game is a podcast from a wonderful radio program, Radiolab–listen to this episode, about the scientist Fritz Haber, who was brilliant, made amazing discoveries, but who also . . . caused great harm.  Showed a certain lack of foresight, of some degree of common sense and personal responsibility.  Here it is:  Fritz Haber.  

    In all of the Ivies, there has been some soul-searching due to things like the financial crisis and recent Great Recession–most of the major players in finance responsible for this fiasco came out of the Ivies, the best and the brightest, as it were, and while Professor Jagannathan seems to intend a more specific emphasis on empirical common sense, ethics itself, forseeing the potential outcomes of scientific work, in every sense, is also important.  As the Haber episode I linked shows.  So don’t write an essay focused entirely on some experiment you did; try to have a wider view into which your experiment might fit, a view of how your work might be of wider benefit, of an ethical dimension as well as a practical dimension.

    2) “Literature is the best way to overcome death. My father, as I said, is an actor. He’s the happiest man on earth when he’s performing, but when the show is over, he’s sad and troubled. I wish he could live in the eternal present, because in the theater everything remains in memories and photographs. Literature, on the other hand, allows you to live in the present and to remain in the pantheon of the future. Literature is a way to say, I was here, this is what I thought, this is what I perceived. This is my signature, this is my name.”

    Ilán Stavans, Professor of Spanish, Amherst College. From “The Writer in Exile: an interview with Ilán Stavans” by Saideh Pakravan for the Fall 1993 issue of The Literary Review.

    Well, there’s nothing like reading the interview as a whole to prepare for this question; here it is: Ilan Stavans Talks.

    Then you might read my posts on writing about books, some of which are linked in my previous post, on the Princeton prompt.

    As for the third prompt for Amherst, I think you could also  look at my post on the Princeton prompts for insight–here is the Amherst prompt:  3) “It seems to me incumbent upon this and other schools’ graduates to recognize their responsibility to the public interest…unless the graduates of this college…are willing to put back into our society those talents, the broad sympathy, the understanding, the compassion… then obviously the presuppositions upon which our democracy are based are bound to be fallible.”

    John F. Kennedy, at the ground breaking for the Amherst College Frost Library, October 26, 1963

    And, to conclude, If you have a Social Justice class, or personal experience with stereotypes and overcoming obstacles, prompts four and five might work for you–notice my excerpt from the interview with the Dartmouth admissions officer, above; he seems to be advising you just to tell your story, if you do have one, without all those autobiographical narrative tricks designed to pump up the suspense and excitement (starting with a dramatic quote or scene, for example).  Straightforward is probably better for those with real drama in their essays.  You might also want to visit some posts I wrote long ago about ways to get prompts like these wrong.  I’ll put those links below the final Amherst prompts; here they are:

    4) “Stereotyped beliefs have the power to become self-fulfilling prophesies for behavior.”

    Elizabeth Aries, Professor of Psychology, Amherst College. From her book, Men and Women in Interaction: Reconsidering the Difference.

    5) “Difficulty need not foreshadow despair or defeat. Rather achievement can be all the more satisfying because of obstacles surmounted.”
    Attributed to William Hastie, Amherst Class of 1925, the first African-American to serve as a judge for the United States Court of Appeals

    General Advice/How Not To Blow It On Your College Application Essay

    How to Evade the Cliche In Your Application Essay

    Evade the Cliche Step 2

    How College Applications Are Evaluated

    Seven Rules For College Application Success (They Aren’t Really Secrets)

  • Princeton Essays for 2015-2016: Getting the Job done

    This post specifically discusses the Princeton Supplemental Essay prompts used in recent application cycles (2015-2016 and 2014-2015) and in the process also addresses essays about or based on quotes, as well as addressing essays about national problems, essays about ethical matters, essays about culture (and food) and essays about personal beliefs.  Much of the content is, therefore, germane to these topics in general.  

    Numerous links to examples and additional reading are included.  This is an update to last year’s post on the same prompts, with some new links and other changes to make your essays relevant for this year.  It is also a very long post, because I address all the Princeton prompts in it, in detail, so you might want to scroll down to the one or two prompts that most appeal to you–or you might read the whole post and find an idea you had not yet considered.

    If you need editing, contact me soon to guarantee yourself and editing slot:  Editing Services.

    I will address the Princeton Supplement prompts one at a time, repeating each prompt so that you do not have to look it up again. After you have written a draft, you can send it to me as a Word attachment, to wordguild@gmail.com. I will give you a free sample edit and a price quote–but serious inquiries only, please; I’ll give you enough for you to judge what I can do for you.

    Note well that the Princeton Supplement begins with this admonishment:  In addition to the essay you have written for the Common Application, please select one of the following themes and write an essay of about 500 words in response (no more than 650 words and no less than 250 words). Please do not repeat, in full or in part, the essay you wrote for the Common Application.  The underlining is mine.

    Many people are choosing a “second string” Common App essay because of the way some of Princeton’s prompts overlap with the Common App prompts, and because of the very obvious way that the word count requirements fit the Common App this year.  Using an essay you opted not to use is okay only if you think it’s equal in quality to the one you chose or if you can work some more on it to improve it.  If this app matters to you, of course.  If it’s just a lark, don’t sweat it too much.

    The rest of this post is for people who want to put in some work to have a great essay.  If that’s you, read on.

    Princeton Supplement Prompt 1

    Tell us about a person who has influenced you in a significant way.

    I really don’t have anything to say about this prompt beyond what I have already said about the same prompt on the old Common App, which I discussed over the last two years–you can see my archives, or to save time,   use this link to see what I gave you on Prompt Three of the Common Application, which is in the same topic zone, and have a look at my second entry on the same subject here: The Demons are in the Details.

    Princeton Supplement Prompt 2

    Using the statement below as a starting point, tell us about an event or experience that helped you define one of your values or changed how you approach the world.

    “Princeton in the Nation’s Service” was the title of a speech given by Woodrow Wilson on the 150th anniversary of the University. It became the unofficial Princeton motto and was expanded for the University’s 250th anniversary to “Princeton in the nation’s service and in the service of all nations.”

    Woodrow Wilson, Princeton Class of 1879, served on the faculty and was Princeton’s president from 1902–1910.

    Let me begin by suggesting that the Princeton admissions officer might be a bit more impressed by an applicant who actually showed that she had read the speech.  Try this link and give it a few minutes; I recommend taking notes:  Princeton in the Nation’s Service.

    I will pause for dramatic effect while you read the speech.

    Welcome back.  This speech will feel archaic  to most of its modern readers in its vocabulary and in its Anglo-Saxon, Protestant ideals, but I would say that this is the point.  Hopefully you read all the way to the bottom of the page and read the footnote about the fact that Wilson had suffered  a stroke and struggled physically to finish rewriting the speech on a typewriter.  There is a moral message of a sort right there, folks, about Wilson’s grit as well as  his  sense of duty.  Compare the person making the speech and the content of the speech to many of our politicians and much of what passes for political philosophy today. The contrast is clear.

    At the risk of sounding preachy, I would point out that  the last few decades have been notable for material excess and personal aggrandizement, often at the expense of others–the upper echelon of Goldman Sachs, for example,  has been wildly successful in the terms of our culture, meaning they made incredible amounts of money, but it’s hard to argue that much of their work has been a boon to our society or to the world financial system in general.  A quick review of their role in the European debt  crisis–they enabled Greek currency manipulation–and their simply fraudulent actions in the derivatives market in the United States makes this clear.   I would suggest to you that Princeton is taking a strong stance against the attitude embodied by people who act in the interest of short-term and personal profit over the long-term good for all.

    You don’t have to be Anglo-Saxon or Protestant to have a sense of duty, of course–go look up Dharma if you have any questions about that–but clearly Wilson himself in his speech and in his physical situation while writing and giving the speech was embodying a certain spirit of sacrifice.  This is  important because a prompt like this tells you  what your university is looking for in its prospective students:  a future Lord of Wall Street needs not apply.

    If I may quote from Wilson’s  essay, this section, by establishing what Wilson saw as the purpose of the university, also reinforces what the university still sees as its purpose:

    “Princeton was founded upon the very eve of the stirring changes which put the revolutionary drama on the stage, –not to breed politicians, but to give young men such training as, it might be hoped, would fit them handsomely for the pulpit and for the grave duties of citizens and neighbours. A small group of Presbyterian ministers took the initiative in its foundation. They acted without ecclesiastical authority, as if under obligation to society rather than to the church. They had no more vision of what was to come upon the country than their fellow colonists had; they knew only that the pulpits of the middle and southern colonies lacked properly equipped men and all the youth in those parts ready means of access to the higher sort of schooling. They thought the discipline at Yale a little less than liberal and the training offered as a substitute in some quarters a good deal less than thorough. They wanted “a seminary of true religion and good literature” which should be after their own model and among their own people.

     It was not a sectarian school they wished. They were acting as citizens, not as clergymen . . .”

    It’s not an accident that this speech tweaks one of its rivals, Yale, and Princeton clearly sees itself as a liberal institution in the traditional sense of the word, producing people of wide-ranging  knowledge and overall excellence who will practice the Aristotelian virtues of service and thought.   So may I strongly suggest that your essay for this prompt show you as a thinking and active member of American society who is concerned with the state of the world and the welfare of his or her fellow citizens.  (To be fair to Yale, I think Harvard has more suspects behind some of our recent economic troubles.)

    On the other hand, you don’t want to come off as a hand-wringer or platitude fabricator as you demonstrate your sense of duty and your awareness of the Big Picture, and your essay should not fall into the trap of being too self-referential; its focus should be more on what you observed than on what you felt, on what should be done rather than on how to point fingers.

    You should also not offer simplistic solutions to the problems which you  discuss–just look at the Occupy movement, which morphed into all kinds of weirdness, especially in places like Oakland, as various violent elements like the so called black-maskers and so-called anarchists infiltrated the scene–they were not always the same people– and caused trouble.  Seriously, smacking with a hammer a waiter who’s trying to stop you from breaking the window in the restaurant he works at is not fighting the Man, and the  Eat the Rich slogans do not have a lot of traction as prescriptions for change.

    Anger isn’t a solution, nor are platitudes.   Though anger is necessary to get a movement for change started.   It just has to be channeled into something other than violence.  Ask Nelson Mandela, or Ghandi or Reverend King.  So try to avoid both overt anger and platitudes  if you write about economic justice and social well-being.  And keep in mind that in this country, having a shot at a decent income and quality of life is intertwined with that line you likely  memorized about the pursuit of happiness.

    I would add to this that if you are writing about  social and economic justice, you wouldn’t want to appear as if you suddenly noticed the income gap last week.  A sense of commitment should be clear in your essay, and not just clear in the nice things you say. Hopefully you have either a track record in some sort of work or volunteering, and the best thing would be if it were in addition to your required community service hours.

    For recent background on economic justice and its history in the last few years, I would start with this month’s fast-food strike, in which workers in hundreds of cities walked out of their jobs or took their day off to ask, en masse, for a living wage.  Start here, for information:  Fast Food Strike.  Then there is the Walmart food drive–for its own employees.  Probably you have heard or read about it, but here’s a decent summary:  Food Drive.  

    I must add at this point, that these two items would be nice examples for an essay, but they don’t offer much in the way of solutions to the bigger problems, though I would say that a higher minimum wage would be a good start.  I add that I am aware of the argument for inflationary effects, but many economists see no problem for the greater economy with a national minimum wage somewhere between twelve and fifteen dollars an hour.  I don’t have time to get into the whole we-are-competing-with-the-whole-world/race to the bottom thing in this post, though you might want to bring it up in your own essay.

    Did I mention that many fast food workers have trouble getting a second job because  fast food joints–the big corporate ones–expect their workers to work a varying schedule, filling in wherever they are needed in a given week?  Makes it tough to fit a second job in when you can’t schedule time more than a week in advance.

    It is also worth looking at the Occupy movement in its early days, for the spirit of the thing and the reasons for anger–have a look at this link in the New York Review of Books for a good discussion of Occupy if you are interested: In Zucotti Park

    A few other things to remember about this speech involve  Woodrow Wilson himself.  He was an internationalist who believed strongly not just that the United States participate in international affairs, but that we be, well, a bit Arthurian, a leader yet seated at a Round Table–he did want a League of Nations, after all . . . so if you are an isolationist or  tend to speak like the more hysterical members of the Tea Party movement, Princeton seems to suggest in presenting Wilson’s speech that you might want to go elsewhere for school.  Yale, I guess.  Or tone it down.

    In concluding our discussion of this prompt, I mention my view that the Tea Party and the Occupy people share a fundamental American concern for fairness and equality, and that I look forward to some sort of shared agenda arising from these populist movements, especially if things get worse.  If you do prefer tea to coffee, so to speak, you might explore that kind of common value, which would prevent you from coming  across like, well, Sean Hannity.  Woodrow Wilson would not have been a fan of the Tea Party; in using his speech, Princeton is taking a stance that is both principled and political.  Keep that in mind.

    Princeton Supplement Prompt 3

    Using the quotation below as a starting point, reflect on the role that culture plays in your life.

    “Culture is what presents us with the kinds of valuable things that can fill a life. And insofar as we can recognize the value in those things and make them part of our lives, our lives are meaningful.”

    Gideon Rosen, Stuart Professor of Philosophy, chair of the Council of the Humanities and director of the Program in Humanistic Studies, Princeton University

    Pretty stuffy-sounding phrasing, but this is a great prompt, and not just for people from specific and clear ethnic bacgrounds.  Music, architecture, dance, literature, all the artifacts around us represent culture.  Cars are culture (and also capture the often paradoxical nature of it, the good and the bad:  with the car, independence and mobility, really the entire American way of life, set against urban sprawl, traffic deaths, pollution and climate change.)

    Clearly, culture is an enormously   broad subject, so I am going to focus in this post on one area of culture everyone shares:  food. (I’ve already written about books–about writing about books, about books as culture–elsewhere, both in my links for Princeton this year and in other examples in my archive).

    Whether your mother (or father–things have changed) makes saurkraut or brews beer or has kimchee fermenting away or simply cooks anything with regularity, you are in touch with culture as food.  Just look at holiday meals, how they are used to  pass on traditions, and not just in the form of recipes.  This is a rich source of personal experience for essays.

    I’ll start my links with Roi Choi, who is a pioneer of the new-wave food truck industry, and who recently published a cookbook that is more autobiography than recipes; here’s an interview with him:  L.A Son.  The early part of this interview pretty much shows what I mean about food and culture as Choi talks about kimchi and how his native Korean culture is, for him, rooted in food.

    Also roaming the greater L.A. area is one of the great food writers of today, Jonathan Gold, food critic for the L.A. Times and fanatical hunter for cheap and interesting ethnic food.  Here are a couple of appetizers that give a good taste of his writing–pay close attention to his use of detail and the casual but tightly written style he has evolved:

    Jonathan Gold on Tacos

    Jonathan Gold on Udon

    And consider your own family’s food traditions as an expression of culture and get writing.  I recommend starting when you are just a bit peckish, to stimulate your descriptive skills, dining only after the first draft is done.

     

    Princeton Supplement Prompt 4

    1.Tell us how you would address the questions raised by the quotation below, or reflect upon an experience you have had that was relevant to these questions.

    “How can we unlearn the practices of inequality? In other words, how do we increase our capacities not just to act without racism but to actively promote racial equality?”Imani Perry, Professor, Center for African American Studies, and Faculty Associate, Program in Law and Public Affairs, Princeton University.  

    This prompt asks for a very personal response.  I am revising this post in the week after the death of Nelson Mandela; though imprisoned when I was in high school and college, he was still a presence in my life, here, in America, and in addition to your own experience, I’ll just add that there is no better model of how to address this prompt than Nelson Mandela.

    The book Conversations with Myself is a good introduction to his life, and if you have seen the recent movie, you really should also read this, which shows even more clearly  how he lived the idea of racial equality, moving from his involvement in often violent resistance to apartheid to his stance against revenge and violence when he left prison.  It shows both his incredible will and discipline and his humanity, his quirks and foibles.  A good, quick  introduction to the book and to Mandela’s life is in this review, from The Guardian: Conversations With Myself.  

    Princeton Supplement Prompt 5

    Using a favorite quotation from an essay or book you have read in the last three years as a starting  point, tell us about an event or experience that helped you define one of your values or changed how you approach the world. Please write the quotation at the beginning of your essay.  

    Michel de Montaigne, the guy who developed the essay as a literary form, also initiated many of his essays with a quote that conveyed an idea which he would develop throughout the essay, and he would weave in more quotes as he went, so this essay prompt harks back to the beginnings of the form.  Too see some stuff from him, I send you now to another link in which I mention this hero of letters, where I also provide a second link to a good article about his life and essays,.  Montaigne himself is a great source of quotes.  By the way, if you read an essay, say, today, and really liked it, and could use it, that fits the prompt’s requirement that you have read this in the last three years.  That’s called inspiration and it’s totally authentic, if you do it right.

    Now to the central problem of this prompt:  starting with a quote can be hackneyed and the quote intro can also be used thoughtlessly or clumsily–for example, by jumping from the quote to a more-or-less unrelated idea in such a way that the quote is really an excuse to start an essay more than a true starting point.  And don’t force the book and your experience together.   You can write a great essay which references your life to knowledge found in a book, but it is vital that the quote–and the book–relate somehow to your experience in an honest way.  See my discussions of writing about books which may help you with the thought process, though rather than finding a way to link a book to a book, you look for a single book to relate to your life.  Be sure that the quote you used is not taken out of context, and that you deal with the essay or book as a whole.

    If you searched “Essays that start with a quote,” in addition to finding a number of college application essay books, you’ll also find web pages explaining how clichéd and terrible these essays are.  If you were cynical, you might draw the conclusion that this essay is a trap.  An optimist might argue that Princeton is trying to breathe life into a venerable style of essay.  My view is, it depends on what you do with it.  Anything which is treated witlessly can become a cliché.

    Alternatively, you can write a quote-based essay that is more obscure than an 8th Grade Confessional Poem Using Only Adverbs.  Be sure not to  make your reader have to figure out what the quote has to do with everything else in the essay and if you use multiple quotes, be sure that they are suitable and relate to what is around them.

    The idea is that the opening quote should be integrated into or lead naturally into the opening paragraph and so flow on through the rest of the essay.  It might be best to look at a few examples of folks who know how to work a quote into an essay–you might try reading some Montaigne, or for a modern idiom, you could try this link, to Paul Theroux’s the Old Patagonian Express, and read pages 3-6, which don’t begin with a quote, but he soon uses multiple quotes.  This three-page section of the book has been excerpted as an essay and gives a good example of thought and action as Theroux looks at himself in relation to others engaged in the same activity.

    I also suggest that you visit the New York Review of Books, which always has an article which discusses a series of new or recent titles and puts them in perspective. Have a look at my posts on writing about books, starting with this one, and you may find some useful passages for your purposes in this quote essay–be aware that the NYRB articles are meant largely to discuss books but many wander far afield in ways that may give you ideas on writing an essay tying your own life to what you have found in a book.

    In the same vein, In the link here, you will find an NYRB discussion of Michael Lewis’ Boomerang, an especially good book and article for those of you who believe in the idea of economic justice, or even if you think our financial system should be run in a more ethical or simply open and clear way–the article linked here is a good model for how to discuss a book both in relation to oneself and to the larger world, which is part of what they want from you in this prompt.  Of course, you should also be able to show yourself doing something beyond simply observing.  It would help, of course, if you were a participant in some sort of action, though the author shows his own ability to think and does act on his principles by reporting on the book and the world around us.

    Here are two  more specific examples from Joan Didion; both are a factor of magnitude longer than the 500 word essay but they still give you the flavor and an example of how to work with quotes.  Notice that some of Didion’s essays could be cut down to a three-paragraph excerpt and, with perhaps a sentence or two of more direct exposition, work as a short essay, like the one you want.

    “Goodbye To All That”

    “On Self Respect”, in which Didion quotes from herself to get things going.

    That’s all for now, folks.  Good luck and good writing (and reading).

  • The Harvard Application Essay for 2013-2014: Back to the Future

    Or to the past, because Harvard’s prompts are a blast from the past, especially if the past is the old Common Application Prompts.

    The prompts that Harvard has up this year are a mix of old Harvard prompts and the prompts that your older friends or siblings wrote for the Common Application if they applied in recent years.   I’ll analyze the prompts separately, in order, right after this message:

    Editing Update, 12/26/13:  I have a few editing slots open going into the last weekend of December; if you have 1-3 essays that need editing for a final app, contact me by splicing this address into an e-mail, with the heading “editing request” and a brief description of what you need:  wordguild@gmail.com

    Final requests taken on Sunday, 12/29/13.  

    And now, here is my Harvard analysis: 

    1. Briefly elaborate on one of your extracurricular activities or work experiences. (Required, 150 word max, Paste in).

    150 words is not much space, which reinforces that this “essay” prompt is meant as a chance either to elaborate on material you (hopefully) already listed for them, or to describe an interesting aspect of your life that merited essentially a footnote in your application or that is not visible at all.  Choose wisely, by which I mean, look first for ways to offset weaknesses and next for ways to play up strengths that may be apparent in your application, and choose a topic  that shows a person who truly  is curious instead of a person who is merely trying to look as if he or she is curious .

    If you appear to be a stereotypical asocial math and computer whiz, try to find a way to talk about something else–your stats and classes should already show your prowess in these fields, supported by your transcript, so maybe you should talk about your love of windsurfing or (harmless) flash mob organizing.  If you are weaker in math, find a way to offset that–your love of philosophy and logic, through your sideline, studying Zeno’s paradoxes, or perhaps your organizing skills or ability to find your way in the dark without a compass.  Be creative.

    It’s fine to repeat things that are prominent on your “resume” so long as you are truly and deeply enthusiastic about the topic you choose.  You can sneak in some other things by showing, for example, how your interest in Topic A lead you to Topic B, the subject of your essay here (or paragraph, probably).

    As for essays on work, I wouldn’t necessarily say not to write about your job flipping burgers, but you might want to give it some heft.  Try reading or at least perusing Barbara Erenreich’s Nickled and Dimed for some ideas on how to add depth to an essay on your fast-food/entry-level side job.  Internships will hopefully also provide fodder for an intellectual experience essay.

    Now let’s look at the remaining prompts as a group, with links to topics that can be used to address the prompts:

    2. You may wish to include an additional essay if you feel that the college application forms do not provide sufficient opportunity to convey important information about yourself or your accomplishments. You may write on a topic of your choice, or you may choose from one of the following topics (Optional, 1300 word Max, Paste In) 

    – Unusual circumstances in your life
    – Travel or living experiences in other countries
    – What you would want your future college roommate to know about you
    – An intellectual experience (course, project, book, discussion, paper, poetry, or research topic in engineering, mathematics, science or other modes of inquiry) that has meant the most to you
    – How you hope to use your college education
    – A list of books you have read during the past twelve months


    My first advice is this:  You should, of course, write this extra, “suggested” essay.  You do want to avoid overlaps with whatever common app essay you choose to use.

    Turning to new developments for this year, Harvard  has for the most part just  rearranged some words  from last year’s  prompts.  The prompt asking you to write a  letter to your future college roommate was introduced last year, and is either borrowed from recent Stanford supplements or great minds really do think alike.

    This year’s prompt on an intellectual experience was added as a word change to a similar, earlier prompt and  is  much broader than that earlier prompt  on an academic experience, which it replaced in 2012.  Academic limits you to school and maybe that internship or research project you did.  Intellectual does not limit your topics as much. Music, film, rock climbing, almost any serious human endeavor or experience can have an intellectual aspect to it, if you look at it the right way.  Books, of course,  are an ancient source of intellectual experiences and these will be a specific focus in this post.

    I will start you with  links to some of my earlier posts which specifically address Harvard or relate to the prompts for 2013 that relate to or could be topics for this years prompts.  These posts will help get you started as you generate ideas.

    I  address the list of books essay  in a separate post–this essay can take various forms, but avoid just making it a list of book blurbs; find a way to tie the books together, based on some sort of shared idea or other connection.  The posts below should help you get started with a book, travel/experience or letter essay:

    Writing About Books

    Writing About Books II

    Writing About Books III

    Writing About Books I

    Travel or Living Experiences

    My main warning is to avoid the stereotypical “My Trip” essay, which takes three forms:  1) shallow travelogue 2) travel experience with a “life’s lesson” forced upon it 3) Patronizing description of people with odd habits living in an exotic place/poor people living in an exotic place.   It’s incredibly easy to sound patronizing when writing about other countries and peoples and you should never forget that, in writing about another place, the subject of an application essay is still you.  Be aware of what you are revealing about yourself.

    How to Write About  a Trip While Not Tripping Over Stereotypes:  Evading the Cliche II

    College Essay No-No’s

    Writing a Letter to Your Roommate

    Consider Your Audience Before Writing Anything:  So You Want to Write a College Essay

    Stanford Essay 2011, including brief advice on Writing a Letter to Your Roommate

    My full-package college application clients are all done with their apps, so I will have some space for new editing work from today on through the 28th of December, 2013.  You can e-mail me at wordguild@gmail.com to inquire.  Good luck and Good Writing.

  • Back To The University Of Chicago Application Essays: What They Aren’t Telling Us About History (And What We Aren’t Noticing)

    This post is on last year’s University of Chicago prompts.  If you want to write an essay about history for a college app that would allow a response on this basic topic, go ahead and read the post below.  If not, this post is  totally history . . . but for this year’s University of Chicago prompts, you can go here:

    University of Chicago Essay Prompts for 2014-2015

    These new posts are history in the making, which is where you should be. 

     

    Overview of this Post:  I will address the history prompt of the University of Chicago in this post and describe three basic approaches to the prompt, supplemented by a miscellany of ideas and inspirations, supported by numerous informative and inspirational links that range from the old Cointelpro program to  NSA spying and Edward Snowden to social network “privacy policies” and Jaron Lanier and on to Harry Frankfurt, the philosopher who wrote the book On B********.  Not to mention Hannah Arendt, Daniel Goldhagen, and different ways the Holocaust is interpreted, also with links.   I conclude with a very strong movie recommendation for a film that examines what it means to live in a state ruled by secrecy–the film alone makes reading to the bottom of the post worth it.  The post is broken up into rough subtopics, but within some subtopics on how to approach the prompt, you will find multiple ideas.  And while you read, keep in mind what George Orwell wrote in 1984: He who controls the past controls the future.  He who controls the present controls the past.  Have at it:

    I know, I know, it’s a long title for a little four thousand or so word blog post, but we must give the Windy City, the City of the Big Shoulders, Chi-Town, The Chill,  The City on the Lake and the City on the Make its due.   All of these phrases are or have been used for the City of Chicago, some of them still in use, some of them artifacts of history.  Which makes this an apropos intro to a blog post on the University of Chicago’s essay prompt about history, the latest in what is by far the greatest series of college essay prompts.

    The Beginning of History

    So let’s start with  a word about history.  It’s worth thinking about what history is before you write about it.  We begin, dear readers, with the fact that the man called The Father of History has also been called The Father of Lies.  His name was Herodotus, and he wrote a long book relating his inquiry–the Greek word for inquiry is historia–into the origins and conduct of the Persian Wars. It’s pretty much the decline and fall of the Persian empire.   He was born in what we now call Turkey, but the area in which he was raised was Greek culturally, and he viewed himself as Greek–which brings up the first thing about histories.  What’s in them depends on who writes them.  Given the times, Herodotus was pretty fair in his presentation, but one wonders what the Persian Wars would be called by a Persian.

    Herodotus discusses in great detail the cultures and leaders involved, with granular detail on specific battles–that movie The 300  was, uh,  taken from Herodotus’ account of the battle of Thermopylae (I should say, taken from Herodotus, run through a Chippendale’s transmogrification machine and subjected to  historical revision injections until, voilà! 300 iron-pumping Trojans fighting in pull-up diapers, without the benefit of armor.  Thus we have what movies tell us about history–or really, about what sells tickets.  Not a bad topic idea, if I may say so.)

    While Herodotus tried to be factual and would only use material he himself had learned directly from a source, this often included quite a bit of, ah, somewhat inflated and apocryphal if not downright fanciful information–such as his accounts of griffins, dragons and his introduction of the phoenix to the western world. (Search the page for “phoenix” to find Herodotus’ account.)  Like all of us, his ability to examine the underpinnings of knowledge and opinion in his epoch were limited, and he gave us his best version of the facts as he knew them.  Which is pretty much what any history does, but even the best have flaws.  So as I said, Herodotus the Father of History is a pretty good place to start with a prompt about history.  And before we dive deeper,  here is Chicago’s history prompt:

    ESSAY OPTION 3.

    “This is what history consists of. It’s the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us.” — Don DeLillo, Libra.

    What is history, who are “they,” and what aren’t they telling us?

    Inspired by Amy Estersohn, Class of 2010

    Returning to Herodotus for  a moment, and to why this man the Greeks called  The Father of History was also called The Father of Lies: later scholars took umbrage at his methodology, and condemned him because he took so many apocryphal stories at face value and included them in his book.  Like that Phoenix thing.  (One also wonders  if Xerxes really had his men whip the ocean at the Hellespont to punish it for wrecking his pontoon bridge.)  To be fair to Herodotus, living as he did on the edge of the Greek world and rubbing shoulders literally with people the Greeks considered barbarians, he was amazingly open-minded for his time and place.  And he did call it an inquiry, an historia, which does connote an open-ended exploration, which is what he literally did by traveling as he conducted his inquiry, seeing at first hand many places he wrote about. Imagine someone in the ancient world, traveling by foot, boat and animal, trying to run down the original source of every tale, or to double-check the veracity of every source in a work as large as Herodotus’ Histories, especially without tools like real libraries, much less the internet.  Not gonna happen.  Herodotus shows us that, in its origins, history is, indeed, a  kind of storytelling, shaped by the tools and knowledge available in his time as well as by his outlook–his personality.  So in the shaping of history, one place to look for a “they” and to examine what they aren’t telling us is to look at the writers of history and their circumstances–and there are many who write history who aren’t in fact  historians.  In our time, pundits seem to have replaced reporters, in a way that changes the ongoing narrative of recent events, substituting beliefs no more real than is the Phoenix while the history of the moment is recorded.

    History as a Shifting Narrative

    That would be my first way to look at the question, by looking at all histories as stories, and what is not told is a result of the outlook of the time and of its  limitations.  Each era is marked by limitations in the knowledge available, and also by limitations in what people seem able to see, by what information is accepted as relevant–behind the stories we know are many more stories untold, and what stories are told, and what they mean, changes with each era.   So what is “truth,” what becomes our  history, is a result of not just the incidents in time, but the perspective and tools of that place in time,  influenced as well by the individual personalities doing the research and writing. The “they” in the prompt can be historians, can be reporters, or pundits or even powerful interests setting up think tanks to shape public opinion, but “they” is also the culture at large, what we as a group are willing to hear and ready to understand.  There are pivotal people who do shape perception, who push it one way or another, by being in a certain place at a certain time, or by finding a new cache of overlooked, lost or secret material, or by simply putting all the pieces together.  Hannah Arendt, for example, famed for her phrase “the banality of evil,  or more recently, Daniel Goldhagen, who dismissed Arendt’s argument.

    Speaking of which, one interesting example of how history is a changing narrative is what is usually called the Holocaust.  In the period after the war, multiple narratives developed about the holocaust–that it was an act of unspeakable evil committed by inhuman monsters;  that the average soldier didn’t participate in the machinery of genocide directly, and that the average German also did not–though they did turn a blind eye; that it was a mixture of conformity, fear and antisemitism that, step by step but without a clear overall plan, eventually led to the Final Solution.  But late in the century, continuing into the early part of this century, that narrative has shifted–with books like Hitler’s Willing Executioners, which detailed a very high level of knowledge and mass participation in the events of the Holocaust.  Daniel Goldhagen, the author, effectively indicts German culture at large, which is quite a change from many of the  earlier historical readings, which tended to see it as  caused by  a relatively small number of leaders who created the Final Solution piecemeal, over time, and who used a larger group of fanatics from the ranks of the SS and the Gestapo,  leaving the rest of the Germans as either ignorant, afraid or “just following orders.”  So what is being told–and what is being left out–also changes over time.  Goldhagen’ s swing to a broad assignation of guilt  to non-Jewish Germans as a whole, is highly controversial, but I think that just reinforces my point about history as a changing narrative–for more on that controversy, see this:  Willing Executioners?  Be advised that I have merely provided a couple of examples of different readings of this history–scholars have found over forty different frames for Holocaust studies, as shown here:  A Survey of Interpretive Paradigms.

    Don Delillo and Us:  The Sum Total of Being Watched

    We are a lot like Herodotus, who recorded so much apocryphal information from supposed witnesses, but instead of receiving our information via interviews that we may not be able to corroborate, we rely on media, and more and more for your generation, dear reader, not so much internet research as information spread through social media. I add here that I am fascinated by the degree of gullibility and cynicism that internet “knowledge” develops, but that would take an entire series of posts to address, so I’ll just move on now to  a consideration of Don Delillo and his context.   Since he’s the source of the quote, he is definitely worth knowing about.

    The quote used in this prompt is from DeLillo’s novel Libra, (about the Kennedy assassination, in this anniversary year of the Event in Dallas, but it’s only a coincidence . . . or maybe not ) but Delillo’s breakout novel is entitled White Noise; it is about a professor at a small university, head of the Department of Hitler Studies (!), a field of his invention–but also an obvious parallel/parody of Holocaust studies–and the good professor’s  observations of the effects of a mysterious Airborne Toxic Event, especially on himself and his wife and family.  Fear of death is a major subject, as is the use of pharmaceuticals to deal with what ails us, including our fear of death.  I love that part, especially given when the book was written years before the idea of mood enhancing drugs became mainstream.   In a 1988 review in the New York Review of Books, Robert Powers memorably called him “chief shaman of the paranoid school of American fiction.”

    I love that.   Delillo, a man of his Cold War generation, does see conspiracies,  if not everywhere, then as pretty frequent features in our social and cultural geography. Dialing the time machine back to Delillo’s salad days, Nixon was definitely not telling us for months that he was bombing the sovereign country of Cambodia as part of his Vietnam strategy; the CIA did not tell us they were spying on Americans in the 1970’s especially antiwar activists and others exercising the 1st amendment rights; the FBI didn’t tell civil rights leaders that their phones were tapped. But the rumors circulated, and the truth finally did out.  Or what we now about now came out . . . .Who knows what we don’t know?  For more on this era, start here: Cointelpro.

    So Delillo has good reason to view history as being untold, as shaped by conspiracies.  And after the black sites of the CIA and “rendition” programs were revealed back in the “oughts”, it became clear that the same hidden machinery working away in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s had not gone anywhere.  Then came  Mr.  Snowden and his, ah, communications team, Glen Greenwold and Laura Poitras, and we learned we have all been spied upon, excuse me, have had our metadata analyzed and our communications mapped, with times and places.  Oh, and the topics we discussed noted.  Oh, and the discussions themselves recorded.  Oh, and our skype calls monitored and. . . never mind.

    Delillo is, indeed, interested in what you might call the secret history behind history, and the past year has revealed a whole lot about the secret war in which we have all been pawns, witting or not.  Going further, Delillo has also defined a very specific role for writers as gadflies, as rebels, those whose job it is to  question the accepted values and beliefs of their cultures.  So history in Delillo is a bit like the proverbial iceberg, with what you can see only part of the story.  Why the events really happened and who is responsible lies underwater in an unseen world of unknown events and unknown causes for the events that are known.  I might add that documents released by Edward Snowden show that the NSA has, literally underwater, attached probes that extract the contents of various undersea communication cables,  sucking up every e-mail, et al, that goes through the conduits of international communication.  So the point of view in the Delillo approach to history is that you cannot  trust the authorities and you can never be certain that you have the whole story.

    This is not a new idea, of  course; the legal grounds for the stuff our intel agencies and the Brits are doing go at least back to WWI  and the Espionage Act, or the Czar’s secret police or to Lincoln in the Civil War or to the Star Chamber and Queen Elizabeth’s secret police, and you can find examples of clueless authorities all the way back to the Book of Job, but Delillo and his baby boomer ideas of conspiracy, shaped by the Cointelpro revelations from back in the day,  take on a new life with Snowden and  what we might call the  Wikileaks school of history.  The they of the prompt, in this case, are not just the visible government, but the increasingly powerful cryptocracy that runs the show behind the scenes and which, like wizards, both protects and amplifies its  powers  through the  circular logic of secrecy,which I might summarize in this way: “We can’t tell you what what we are doing, but trust us, it saved thousands of lives, the details of which we can’t share because they are secret.  By the way, why aren’t you buying the geriatric brand of dogfood for your aging dog instead of that higher fat dogfood showing up on your charge card, and is that an illegal download of music we see on your hard drive?”

    And this leaves aside the issue of the privatizing of war making and spying–Snowden himself was a contractor for the NSA, in effect a mercenary who didn’t like the principles under which his employer operated, and blew the whistle.

    This second way to look at history as what we aren’t being told also introduces the digital world as perhaps the major factor in what is told and not told, what is known and by whom–which is quite an irony, if you consider the early promise of  the personal computer revolution, which was going to create a  libertarian wonderland of freedom, at least according to the first generation of Silicon Valley moguls. Many of them still seem to think this way  (and notice how Google, Facebook, etc, are Shocked, shocked!  To find spying going on!).

    Clearly the advent of e-mail and then of social networks are providing a vast temptation to spy, and those who are spying–the They who aren’t telling us things–includes both private companies taking personal data in exchange for “free” services but not making any promises about what they may eventually do with our information, and government agencies who have clearly escaped the leashes of their supposed political masters.  These are huge forces shaping what is known, what is told, and what will be known and told in the future.

    Spying always has to do with controlling  human behavior and winning conflicts–notice the targeted ads, aimed at getting you to buy stuff, as well as the intelligence spooks looking to see if you are a “person of interest,” which includes gathering intel on environmentalists,  but of course it’s been clear for years now that all kinds of peaceful domestic groups have been spied on–as here:  2005.  This kind of stuff is always  problematic, but especially at a time when it’s being shown that corporations are effectively writing some of our legislation and that much of the domestic spying seems aligned with particular corporate as well as intelligence interests, this seems, well, to justify the view that we are being conspired against.  Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean my e-mail isn’t being scanned.    And it’s not just the FBI, CIA and NSA that is spying on environmentalists–check out the Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security’s activities for what I’d like to call Orwell light.

    So it’s not just the government and its hidden minions (and not just the U.S. government, either) that is fodder for this essay prompt.  No, let’s face it, it’s the private sector and all those social networking empires as well–most famously Facebook–that play fast and loose with our privacy, scheming to make a buck on what they know about us.  If you’ve been around for a while, you even call it an erosion of privacy–as here: Facebook and the Erosion of Privacy.  And don’t get me started on Google, whose accumulation of data is being challenged in Europe.  One way to look at Google Glass is to see it as a handy way to record everything all of us is doing, voluntarily or not, through an ugly facial apparatus that our friends may choose to wear to, say, our party.  Plug in some facial recognition software and who needs drones to track people?  Even the Google model for ad prices, on the sales side,  echoes the NSA–this is what our ads are worth because this is our data proving what they are worth.  Trust us.

    So we appear to have another essay topic here, folks, using the privacy (non) agreements of Google, Facebook, et al, in which the fine print allows them to change their use of whatever information they have on us at some point in the future.   As Jaron Lanier has said, these guys could get rich just on their search algorithms, but they have chosen to turn their  social networks into private spying agencies.  To whom most of us give quite a bit of information, many essentially putting their entire lives online.  If history is being shaped by these companies, what has recent history shown us about what they aren’t telling us?  You might want to actually pull up the agreement you have signed onto, by clicking agree, and reading it.  You might find an essay’s worth of material there, especially when you click on something like the timeline I linked above and look at the change–or what the heck, here it is again:  Facebook and privacy, a timeline.

    Every Man Is An Island Or, The Problem Is Us As Well As “Them”

    A final thing to consider, and I’ll keep it brief, is the way in which media today is creating a fragmented polity. Back in the day, say 1984, most people got their news from a daily paper, local radio, and one of  the big three television networks. Public radio and television were on the rise, but that’s about it.  A lot of local news had a particular flavor–conservative in conservative parts of the country, not so much on the coasts, but the overall mix was influenced by journalism done in major cities, from which the major networks broadcast–I mean ABC, CBS and NBC–maybe you’ve heard of them.

    Now you have many more sources, but there is no longer as clear a mainstream narrative, driven by these major news organizations, who got many things wrong, but who also but tended to work toward the truth.  So a now vs. then comparison is also a fruitful way to look at how the news of the day, which is what becomes history, is being told.  Clearly journalism has changed, with advocacy becoming the dominant mode of journalism, while the major source of more objective reporting, the newspapers, is  in serious decline and long-form journalism is looking like an endangered species.  (This may not seem like a big deal to you, but it was the newspapers that drove all other news, in the old model; television took their cues, and most of their story ideas that mattered, from the newspapers.  This is still often true, and most internet news sources are actually parasites on other sources, especially newspapers.  Seriously, who came up with or wrote out the stories first?  By the way, I am still encouraging clients to pursue their journalism dreams–but as a Journalism major, be ready to be entrepreneurial, looking for new ways to be paid for content.  Somebody is going to have to produce news, and you know what market economics says about supply and demand . . . eventually content will be worth something again .  .  . maybe a lot, if you are lucky and smart enough to come up with the right venue or model . . . ).

    As for what is wrong with the they in media, telling us what is happening today, just look at the kind of speculation about who’s going to run for president in the next election–it’s not reporting, it’s what I can only call bullshitting, no more real or relevant than sports fans talking about the chances of various teams next year.  (For more on the phenomenon of bullshit, I recommend philosopher Harry Frankfurt–you might start with this:  On Bullshit–a discussion.  You could also try Frankfurt writing on the topic here, a great source of inspiration for who “they” is, what isn’t being (honestly) told, and why.)

    So in my last suggestions on topics, the “Them” in the question can be the media, especially the partisan media, but of course “them” also can mean us, as participants who buy the product and the b.s.  And no, I don’t think a U Chicago reader will object to this term, especially if you name drop Dr. Frankfurt, analytical philosopher.

    The result of all these influences is a real decline in the ideal of objectivity, and it’s increasingly apparent that many people know what they want to know, and go to the outlets that tell them what they want to hear. Don’t believe in global warming?  Spend your time on Fox and websites like The Heartland Institute.  Believe that global warming is simply a finding of science and is happening?  Go to CNBC (with some caveats) or to Realclimate.org.  (I need to add here, having read a lot of science, from science sources, like GISS,  NSIDC, The Royal Society, et al, that it is clear that this climate argument does have a correct answer, which is that it is happening and that it is human driven, and that venues like Fox and Heartland produce smogscreens and misinformation on this matter, both bullshit and lies, not scientifically validated information.)

    But back to my main subject:  the “they” in this final approach to the prompt is really, in the end, us–or many of us–who don’t want to know what we don’t want to know, and who don’t examine what we are getting–and not getting–from our trusted sources, or at least don’t test the stories by looking at other sources closely enough.  This is more true on the conservative side largely because of, in this order, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News–they have simply done a better job of establishing themselves and dominating the arena.  See this analysis of Fox, Wingnut Commander,  for more. And consider, as you think about this approach to the topic, where you get your own news–we usually don’t see our own blind spots, you know . . . it takes a lot of reading, listening and cross-checking over time, these days.

    To return to the Greeks one more time before I wrap up, historia is not so much like Herodotus’ inquiry these days;  it’s more like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, with a babbling mass of prisoners chained down in darkness, staring at the shadows cast by a bluish screens, shadows which they think are real, and exchanging bad information as gospel truth. Or maybe not–scholars studying this matter disagree.

    But speaking of bleak fictional worlds, just think of the possibilities of the future!  When your car, driven by Google, might lock the doors and take you right to the police station after somebody decides what you are e-mailing while the car speeds along is suspect.  Or maybe takes you to a CIA black site.  Keep in mind that I am writing in the best spirit of the Chicago prompts and am kidding.  Maybe.

    And to End:  A Movie

    And now I’d like to suggest, with my highest possible rating, a movie that will convince you that you don’t want to live in a surveillance state:  The Lives of Others.  Get it and watch it as soon as possible.  Then write a great essay.  I wish you all the best as you assess history in our times.

    Good luck on your essay and let me know if you need editing help, by contacting me at

    word guild@gmail.com

    Yep, I use google mail, but I don’t use Google Docs–given the information available, I assume that they are all spying, after all . . .

    Oh, and I accept the ads that may appear at the bottom of this post as necessary to support the wonderful platform of WordPress, but that does not mean that I endorse any specific product which may appear there.  Thanks for your support.

  • How To Get Into College: Or, How To Write The Essay That Will Get You There, Including Essay Examples

    Oh, and what not to do.  For starters, don’t try to imitate too closely (and definitely do not copy) your older sibling/friend/acquaintance/college essay guidebook’s foolproof example essay.  Have a look at them, sure, but for true inspiration, we’ll go to the pros.  More on that in a moment.

    Because, before I get to essay examples, I want to share a “must hear” link to help you out.  Read on for more.

    ******************************************************************************************************

    To begin with,  I’d like to say that the title of this post is a nod to one of the Great American Things, a little radio show called This American Life.  Created by and featuring Mr. Ira Glass and company, one of TAL’s recent shows was entitled, How I Got Into College, and, at the least, you should listen to the prologue and Act One (linked below).   In it,  an admissions officer talk about dumb things people do as they try to get into college, including dumb things that are done with essays (like using the same essay for multiple schools, but not getting the school names right on each essay . . . ).

    Topics addressed include parental support/intervention/obnoxious interference in e-mails and elsewhere, demonstrated interest,  and,  most important for our purposes, the admissions officer talks specifically about why most admissions essays he reads are boring.  The admissions director talks about  the same problems I talk about (e.g., the same basic essay, over and over, as in the My Mission to South America, essay).  This admissions officer also admits that he and his colleagues are part of the problem; he does not, however, specifically discuss the repetitive and self-focused essay questions that are required, again and again (Common App, I’m lookin’ at you )  or why this has come to pass, something I explain here:  Common App.

    So I recommend that you go to my link to TAL’s  College App show, and listen before you read on.  After listening, you can continue reading to find links to examples of good essays, below.  More on that later; for now, here it is:  This American Life:  How I Got Into College.

    Before moving on, I would suggest listening to the whole thing by continuing with Act Two–for a number of reasons.  First among these, it may put the troubles in your own life into perspective.  Second, as you embark on a journey to write about your own life, it is a fascinating study of the malleability of memory . . . as the  protagonist of the rest of this TAL episode, Emir Kamenica, who escaped the Bosnian genocide and is now a rising star at the Booth School of Business, at the University of Chicago, tells his story . . . then hears a different version of things.

    As a follow-up to this show, a listener wrote a hilarious Worst College Essay Ever (my title for it). Read it here:  Prank Admissions Essay

    *******************************************************************************************

    Welcome back, and now we move on to some essay examples.

    By now you all know about the Common Application essay prompts, which are all 1st person, Let Me Tell You About Myself essays.  The Common App has dumped the open question and eliminated the possibility of writing directly about a book or intellectual experience.

    So my first advice for the Common App is this:  Find the Unexpected ; do the Unexpected.  (I capitalize Unexpected by way of emphasis, not to imitate German capitalization conventions.)  This does not really require anything radical or crazy.  It’s all about how you look at things, even the mundane.

    The next point I’d like to make is this:  none of my essay examples below will be student examples.  The reasons are multiple, but two will do as an explanation:  if you want to learn something, from chess to tennis to football to whatever, you don’t usually go study, well, your peers.  You pick out somebody you think is outstanding, if not the best in their field.  Somebody with proven chops.   It’s in that spirit that I offer the examples below, where  I will offer essays by people I admire or essays which I think are really good.  Note that, as examples, most are also too long for our purposes, but you should not be reading to copy exactly–you should read to find ideas, phrases and structures.  My caveat:  you can imitate, borrow, riff off of . . . but do not copy anything more than a quote.  Thanks.  Now on with the show.

    Essay Examples

    After the first example you will find an annotated list with links; this post is planned as one of those that expands over the course of the app season, so check back–I will add material and links as I find them.  I also have plenty of examples with earlier posts, incorporated into discussions of specific topics and topic types, so browse the archive for material that looks like a fit for your topics.

    Okay, here we go:  to show you what I mean about finding the unexpected, as well as how to look for examples, I will start with a link to an essay and then will give you a little editing exercise that will cut this essay down from being about three times the length of a Common App essay to being about 40 words too long, which is a minor overrun, in my world.  I am very serious about the editing exercise–it is short but will teach you a lot about how to look for examples, and how to take apart a longer piece of writing and put it back together–a very educational  exercise in how to read as well as how to edit.

    So go to this  long essay about a young immigrant who found a home, of sorts, in the uber-suburban show The Wonder Years.  Read the whole essay first, then come back for this exercise, below.  The exercise doesn’t take much time and will show you something important about the art of the cut in editing, as well as how to read and how to look for material and ideas that might be useful to you in writing an application or any other essay; here is your link:  My Wonder Years.

    And here is your brief and painless editing exercise:  copy the essay, splice it into a document, then number the paragraphs.  After you number the paragraphs, delete all paragraphs except these paragraphs: 1, 4, 6, 9, 11, 12 and 18.  Yep, all the rest of the essay is deleted.  Then delete the first word in paragraph 12 and capitalize the next word.   Then read this “compact edition” as an essay in itself, which it is.

    You have a very different essay, of course–this shorter version leaves out an important focus in Ms. Nguyen’s  original essay, but notice how it does show her own sense of being an outsider in the United States, as well as her “place” of comfort and connection, a virtual world reached through a television screen.  Yes indeed,  a  nice example of a place you feel comfortable topic.  And this is, in its full form or in my shortened edit, another good example of the Unexpected.

    Example 2: Cooking is Freedom–About a middle school rebellion against sexism and its reverse, by a boy who wasn’t quite fitting the stereotypes of his time and place.  The problem our essayist faces is very much a problem of the early ’70’s, but he writes in a clear and charming way and he absolutely challenges an idea–and he writes  with humor, which is an awfully good thing to have  in an essay that might be number one hundred and ten, on a Wednesday afternoon, for a tired and cranky app reader.

    Example 3: Why Department Stores Are Vital  This essay would also be a great fit for the prompt on a place that you feel comfortable–Here   the author take a place which has most often been used to show what is wrong with America and argues for it not only as a place where she feels comfortable but which she thinks is necessary for our culture–another  great example of the Unexpected, in point of view  and attitude.  The topic is an old one, but the picture we get from the author surprises and charms.

    Example 4: An Essay by M. Allen Cunningham, on the theme of how the Oregon landscape has influenced his work–this is a superb, rambling essay and another essay on place, which also examines the influence of technology in an interesting way and excerpts from the author’s own novels as it develops.  The first two sections could stand as essays by themselves, with a tweak or two, so keep in mind my little editing exercise from Titi Nguyen’s essay, above.  Or just  skip to section #2, for an essay within an essay on place, perception and much more.  Good stuff.

    Example 5 (Multiple Examples): This I Believe—This link will actually take you to a page with multiple essays.  The writing quality is not always exceptional–I would rate them from excellent to decent in their prose quality–but all have something interesting to say about beliefs and acting based on beliefs, or about how their beliefs developed–and they fit any of three of the current Common App topics.  The beliefs here are from the full spectrum–for a taster, this selection includes an opening essay by Penn Gillette, the magican/performer, on why he is an atheist, and if you look further down the page, has an essay under the title My Brother’s Keeper, which starts as the author leaves Sunday school with his kids.  The latter essay is both humanistic and religious, and both the atheist and the believer are sincere and trenchant in discussing their own beliefs.

    I do have one warning for this collection:  this specific  essay topic became really popular in the last decade, primarily because of the This I Believe  project, which was frequently featured on National Public Radio.  So if you write an essay on belief, please don’t start with the clauses I believe in x, or  This I believe: x.  An app reader or officer may start rolling his or her eyes, (Not this again). But even with that caveat, this page, and at least a few of these essays, are definitely worth a visit and may inspire great ideas, even if you do not use any of them now.  Oh, and be sure to be good to the pizza guy.

    As noted above, I plan to expand on this list over the coming months, so you might want to check back on this post in  few weeks, scroll down, and see what is new down here.  Thanks for dropping by.

    And remember:  Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but copying somebody else and claiming that the work is yours is  . . . theft.  Just say no, or this may happen to you, a la Dante:  Wages of Sin.  Hey, man, don’t mess with the Dante.

  • The University Of Chicago Essay Prompt On The Mantis Shrimp: Seeing Is Believing

    This post will focus on another Chicago prompt with both humorous and philosophical  potential, yes that one on the mantis shrimp.  To refresh your memory, here it is:

    ESSAY OPTION 4.

    The mantis shrimp can perceive both polarized light and multispectral images; they have the most complex eyes in the animal kingdom. Human eyes have color receptors for three colors (red, green, and blue); the mantis shrimp has receptors for sixteen types of color, enabling them to see a spectrum far beyond the capacity of the human brain.

    Seriously, how cool is the mantis shrimp: mantisshrimp.uchicago.edu

    What might they be able to see that we cannot? What are we missing?

    Inspired by Tess Moran, Class of 2016

    There are many options for approaching this prompt, but all of them begin with perception.  Here’s the thing:  cones and rods shape what comes into the brain to be seen, but seeing takes place in the brain.   And I’m not sure how far you can really go in talking about what a stomatopod  sees, even with this kind of groovy visual apparatus to riff on, without talking about yourself–when it comes to consciousness, let’s put it in video terms:  you’re Halo and the mantis is Pong.  As soon as you have a thought beyond “eat now” or “run away” about what you are seeing, you do more than a mantis shrimp does with all its rods, cones, infrared, multifocal and other apparatus.  Though I’d hate to get into a game of table tennis with a human-size mantis shrimp.  Speaking of which,  you will likely have to move to an anthropomorphic approach pretty quickly with this prompt if you are going to do anything with it.

    With that as a preface, I would like to observe that the cross-species  thought experiment proposed in the mantis prompt is more complex than it might seem at first, and it opens up the opportunity to be a bit philosophical, and even serious, if you wish.  I will discuss this more specifically  when I discuss what I call Option Two, below.  Keep in mind that, as in all of my prompt and essay analysis,  all of my “options” are arbitrary–these are just  starting points for ideas, not the last word.   But also keep in mind that the trick with a strange or open-ended prompt is to come up with some way to organize your thinking, first by understanding and breaking down the prompt and then by being able to list and categorize ways to approach it–if you don’t do this first, you may end up floundering as you try to slap together disparate ideas.

    And also be aware  that when you talk about this shrimp you are really talking about yourself, showing the reader what you are like as an individual, which is, of course, the point of all the U Chicago prompts.

    The most obvious way to break down the approaches to this prompt is,  first, to  try to walk a mile in the shrimp’s, uh, pereiopods, writing about the world the shrimp would perceive, then shift to some observations about and an elaboration on the interplay of perception and reality, or on how we are shaped by our environments, or pivot from what the shrimp sees to a humorous human topic.

    And now a word from your author:  this post, my friends, is on a University of Chicago prompt from the year 2013-2014.  We are now in the application cycle for 2014-2015.  If you feel I tricked you by making you read a few paragraphs before telling you this, just consider how we have already had a look at perception and reality as well as having started to look at options for an essay like this.  You can continue reading for more, or you can go to the link immediately below, for a quick explanation about how to use my blog, as well as links to currently available college application essay prompts–most of them won’t be online for this year until August 1st, though many schools leave their old prompts up until August 1st.  Now that is tricksy.  For more on why this post is here, as well as posts on this year’s college app prompts, click here:  College Essay prompts and other information, 2014-2015. 

    The First Approach:  My Life as a Shrimp

    To start with, it’s not even a shrimp.  It’s called  a mantis shrimp because it has a resemblance to both of the species in its name.  So you could spend some time on the “shrimp,” learning a bit about it, then write.  Not that a whole lot is actually known about this creature.

    By the way, the word shrimp, while misapplied here, comes form an old Norse word (that’s Viking-speak, to you) and seems to have originally been applied to denote a skinny if not starving cow, among other things, coming from a root verb having to do with shriveling up.  The word skimpy seems to be related to this root as well. I note all this because you have to start an essay somewhere, and even if the mantis is not really a shrimp, as noted above, when you are making stuff up,  start with some facts, however tangential.  Then take it somewhere surprising and interesting.  Maybe the mantis in your essay resents being called a shrimp and wants to talk about that.

    On the other hand, consider what it’s like to be chased by a mantis, to be its prey, as here, where a mantis shatters an old glass a crab tries to use for shelter:  World’s Deadliest (video starts after an ad.  Thanks to National Geographic).  Hard to avoid being anthropomorphic here, as well, but that’s the way it is, with this prompt.

    So I do encourage research–as you can already see, I have done some–but more of a tangential nature than of the formal research paper kind, though if you want to take a scientific slant, you could go all kinds of directions–what is happening to the kind of shallow-water habitat that the mantis needs as the oceans warm with climate change; or how ocean acidification is affecting shellfish of various kinds (hey, the mantis as a species is literally going to see these changes in its habitat –the fact that it has no clue about what is going on both emphasizes the fact that you do, or can, if you conduct a little research, and it also emphasizes the responsibility that those of us with human consciousness have for those changes, both in addressing them and in bearing responsibility as their cause.)

    You could also write a kind of faux-scientific entry on the shrimp–you know, start with the facts, then invent a whole set of  new “facts” or do a takeoff on something, making a turn into satire–a home improvement show for a mantis shrimp, shopping with a mantis, Mantis Iron Chef.  Whatever.  If you want to do humor, start listing ideas, the more ridiculous the better, then you begin with what it sees and take off into fantasyland from there.   Pimp my Mantis Ride.

    After looking at the mantis as predator, it’s also interesting to consider it as dinner, as I found here:  yum, yum.  And if you happen to live in northern California and want to see one in captivity–this does not happen often, for reasons the link with the prompt makes clear–the Monterey Bay Aquarium has one on display currently:  On Display.

    Option Two

    Use the shrimp as a starting point to talk about a philosophical matter raised by this imaginative activity–in other words, work with what this prompt says about  what it means to be human or what it means to be sentient at all.  This could focus on human imagination, perception, creativity, all of which you have to call on to write about what shrimp sees when it sees.  This prompt raises  serious philosophical issues in the realms of ontology and epistemology;   the shrimp is having an experience, but one quite different from you, one that his determined by its physiology and environment, just as yours is. What does it mean for you to imagine yourself as that animal?

    Others before you have thought about thinking about the experience of being another creature–the philosopher Thomas Nagel, for example, who used a similar trope  to examine materialist assumptions about the mind, and argued that a purely mechanistic view of the brain leaves out what it feels like to be embodied as a specific creature.    Nagel discussed this back in the 1970’s, in a famous essay entitled, What Is It Like To Be A Bat?  He noted that we can think about what it means to be a bat–nearsighted, using sound to navigate, etc–but we can never know what it really feels like to be the bat itself; there is something to the individual experience that remains ineffable and unknown from the outside.  Something that demands respect.  I think his critics have missed that last point as they felt he was attacking the materialist approach to the brain as a sort of mechanism, a biological entity which can be broken down.  It certainly is, but that hologram we call the self that arises from it also deserves some respect.

    For more, take a look at Nagel’s original essay here–I recommend it most highly;  the first paragraphs alone will give you a lot to think about: Nagel.  

    From Nagel’s point of view,   we can only talk in a superficial way about what a mantis shrimp can see, from its point of view,  because to do so means talking about its conciousness, not just a range of the visible spectrum–there are a number of ways to talk about why it sees what it sees, including habitat, evolution, the mechanics of its trifocal eyes, etc–but we have to pull back from claiming to know its actual, individual experience.  Yes, I know, the consciousness of a being this far down the cognitive scale from us is hardly a consciousness at all, but Nagel is also indirectly making a profound argument that we should respect the subjective experience of every sentient being as he discusses what it’s like to be a bat–we are more than we appear to be, all the time, and only we know and own our own experience–even if we are the fascinating, ferocious but cognitively primitive mantis shrimp.

    I find it interesting that most of the counter arguments  to Nagel which have been written since do exactly what he suggests they cannot do, by presuming that we will, at some point, be able to map brain activity well enough to show what it is like to be any sentient being and/or that, in being able to manipulate the cognition and experience of a mind, through chemical manipulation, for example, tinkering with dopamine or some other brain chemical, that we know it.  Messing with my head is not the same as being me–a point Nagel would agree with.  And reading a map, even in 3-D, on a screen, even via a virtual reality helmet or goggles, is not the same as being in the territory, or being the territory itself, whether of a stomatopod, a mantis shrimp, a human or  a bat; only the creature  in the moment can be the consciousness,  in the moment  (The map vs. the territory or vice versa is an interesting thing to explore and has been, in philosophy and fiction–I’ll leave that one to you to look up).  I also find this interesting to consider this issue in the age of Facebook and other social media–just as even a relatively simple creature like the mantis shrimp is beyond our real understanding, so are we all more than what an FMRI scan can show, or a Facebook profile, or our meta data, for that matter.  What does it mean to know or to be known–the biggest ontological question of all, folks.

    Do some research and start scribbling down ideas and be aware of what you assign to the shrimp, Oh Human.    Good luck and see you soon.  I may return to the Chicago prompts within a week or so, but I’d also like to get to some of the slowpokes (Princeton, I’m talking to you) in the Ivy league.