Writing the Application Essay on a College Major Archives

How to Write the Yale Supplemental Essays for 2019-2020: Part II, the 250-Word Essays on an Intellectual Interest and on an Issue of Local, National or International Interest

August 3, 2019August 3, 2019wordguild

Who should read this post: Anybody who wants to write a successful Yale supplemental essay, of the 250-word variety. In addition o analyzing prompts today, I have spliced in an example of a problem essay at the end of the post, on a problem that few applicants write about, but more should be writing about.

With that, we turn to . . .

How to Write the Yale Supplemental 250-Word Essay Prompt One

Applicants submitting the Coalition Application or Common Application will respond to the prompt below in 250 words or fewer:

Think about an idea or topic that has been intellectually exciting for you. Why are you drawn to it?

Ah, the Intellectual essay, once again. This is an application essay topic you find from Stanford to . . . well, Yale. And Brown. And U Chicago, in various forms. I write about it every year.

For this particular example, you obviously don’t have much space. On the other hand, if you plan to apply to Stanford, that’s okay–their intellectual experience essay is also 250 words.

Unpacking the prompt, notice it’s essentially two-part:

defining that intellectually exciting area and
showing why you are drawn to it.

If you are heading for some STEM area and have experience, like research, or building a robotic device, that’s the obvious topic for you. It’s perfectly okay for an essay to expand upon a specific area that you also discuss in your activities–just don’t splice the activities paragraph into this essay. Build around the idea.

Notice that my examples in the last paragraph are not from the classroom per se. That’s my next tip. If you are only able to talk about what happened in a class, you are not showing much motivation outside of the “required reading.”

You could be really passionate about literature and write this essay as you apply to go into a language-based major in the humanities, and you’d still want to do more than talk about that inspirational experience reading MacBeth’s final, great soliloquy in your English class. Plugging that experience in would be fine, but for this essay we’d want you to be doing non-assigned reading as well.

An essay about being inspired about ideas, whether the subject is dark matter, and how incredible it is that most of the universe is made up of something that cannot be perceived directly, or the poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, and how he uses words to capture in ineffable beauty and terror of life, in such a way that it’s impossible to actually explain in prose—the key is to show your reader the fascination that you, yourself, feel about this topic. That is, if you want a good essay.

If your strength is doing emphasize that by describing yourself doing, in relation to the topic of your prompt. If your strength is writing, focus on creating a description of your topic that has an impact. And think carefully about your topic. If you write well enough, even something that seems lightweight can work. The key is to choose something that ties into your potential areas of study in college.

An Example of an Intellectual Interest Approach for the Humanities

By way of example, if you are interested in writing or graphic arts, even a pop form like the comic book is legit. The Pulitzer-Prize winning author Michael Chabon showed this (wonderfully) in an essay he wrote for the New Yorker, years back. Specifically, he described how his religion teacher had dismissed comic books as bad, trashy and encouraging an unhealthy tendency to escape reality.

Chabon recounts how his younger self responded by building an intellectual defense, from the heart and from the mind, of comic books and more specifically, of comic-book superheroes. The cape the hero wears occupies a prime position in this defense. Here is a key quote from that essay:

It was not about escape, I wanted to tell Mr. Spector, thus unwittingly plagiarizing in advance the well-known formula of a (fictitious) pioneer and theorist of superhero comics, Sam Clay. It was about transformation.

Chabon then explains how he was transformed by comic books. Of course this essay is thousands of words long, and a 250-word essay might be a single paragraph in a piece of long-for journalism or essay writing. But as an example that expands your potential topics, it’s worth looking at, so here is a link to it:

Secret Skin

Returning to our STEM subjects, try to start with some interesting statement on your area of interest and then explain the ways you have engaged with it, with an emphasis on things you have done, when possible, or start with an anecdote showing you engaged in that area, and again show your long-term involvement with it. If you have a deep personal motivation, such as your interest in the genetics of cancer beginning with the illness of a family member, say that (this kind of experience is not uncommon in those pursuing medicine, in my experience). If you are interested in medicine because your parents told you to be, make up a better reason.

Here are the next two Yale topics:

Applicants submitting the Common Application will also select ONE of the two prompts below and respond in 250 words or fewer:

Reflect on your engagement with a community to which you belong. How has this engagement affected you?
Yale students, faculty, and alumni engage issues of local, national, and international importance. Discuss an issue that is significant to you and how your college experience could help you address it.

If you are working with the Coalition portal, you will write the same essay, with the same two prompts to choose from.

The “community” essay and the issue of importance essay are subjects I have written about before. Just search my tags and subject areas by typing in “concern” and “problem” and scan the posts that pop up. But let me end this by offering my own, 500-word draft on a problem. I know that the prompt here only allows 250 words–I just typed this thing up last week after observing a problem, and you are not supposed to be copying somebody else’s work anyhow–this is just meant to be an example of an approach.

Example of an Essay on a Problem of Local, National and International Importance

Racing to Where?

I am a fan of the Tour de France. Being a fan of the Tour could be comparable to being an NFL fan, if being an NFL fan meant watching football for three or more hours every day for three weeks. With two rest days.

The Tour this year was 3,365 kilometers long. The total time of the winning rider in this year’s tour was Egan Bernal. To win this year, he spent 82 hours and 57 minutes on the saddle.

I admit that I did fast forward some of it, but I saw everything that mattered, from Brussels to Paris. But the tour was supposed to be even longer than those 3,365 kilometers. Specifically, it was to be 3,420 kilometers long. And I saw why it was cut short.

It was cut short because, during Stage 20, while the riders were laboring over the top of one of the most famous passes in Tour lore, the Col d’Iseran, on the highest paved road in the Alps, a freak hailstorm was flooding the next valley. A mixture of ice, rain and snow coated the pavement over a thousand meters below the pass and sent landslides of mud and glacial melt across the course, which in one case sent a French man out clad incongruously in shorts, sandals and a raincoat, to guide a bulldozer trying to clear a foot of ice and water off the pavement.

Freakish weather is not all that freakish in the Alps—it snows in the high mountains any month of the year—but this hail-ice-snow-rain storm had an assist: the glaciers above and around the road have been melting for decades, and the weeks before the tour arrived saw a record-setting heat wave settle over Europe. In effect, the storm just hosed the already-melting surface of the glacier onto the pavement.

This is our new abnormal.

The result for the Tour began as its director, Christian Prudhomme, from the red car that leads the riders to the start of each stage, and from which he monitors the race as it proceeds each day, called Stage 20 to a halt. The effects continued as the next and final stage in the Alps was cut short. This is without precedent.

That storm altered the course of the Tour. It determined that Egan Bernal, the great climber, would clinch the tour as its most important stages, foreshortened, ended as two climbs. That image of a freak storm below the riders, as a glacier which has been receding and collapsing for years coughed up a thick gruel across the course, captures where we are today.

And it told me that I could never watch the Tour again without looking at climate change.

That same dome of heat that softened up those glaciers also seared crops, saw parts of Germany declare a drinking water shortage, and killed thousands. As I write this, it is parked over Greenland, setting a new record for glacial melt.

For me, climate change isn’t about writing an argument on cause and effect, or the future. It’s about doing something, now. So I ride my bike, walk whenever possible. And I write.

That is what my future will be about—doing what I can–and writing to convince others to do what they can.

I have yet to have a client this year write an issue of concern essay on Climate Change. Given the impact that this will have on the future of the planet’s seventeen-year-old humans, I do not understand this.

Let me know if you need help with your essays–I do still have some space for new clients as of early August, 2019–Contact Me.

And They’re Off: College Essay Season Has Begun for 2020–A Look at Saving Work by Combining Essays, a Special Nod to Writing the U-Chicago Prompt 1 and the “Why Cornell” Essay, and Tips on Writing an Engineering Essay for the University of Southern California.

July 6, 2018July 8, 2019wordguild

Who should read this post: anybody applying to multiple colleges in 2020; anybody applying to the University of Chicago; anybody applying to Cornell; anybody applying to U.S.C; and anybody interested specifically in U.S.C.’s Viterbi school of engineering. There will be some research involved. This is a good thing for these essays, and I will show you how.

Some of the major super-selective colleges and a range of other solid schools have already released their essay prompts for 2019-2020, and the Common Application and Coalition portals have had their prompts out for months, which means it’s time to get started on those college essays.

Not ready to write? Then how about some sorting? There are many essays that overlap enough that you can reuse parts, pretty much like swapping parts out from one device to another.

After all, you are likely to apply to ten colleges, in some cases twenty, and one way to save a lot of work is to compare essay prompts, looking for ways to overlap essays and, when possible, to reuse ideas. Reuse full essays less often–Turnitin.com has been widely used by colleges screening essays.

In my experience, some degree of essay polygamy is the name of the game if you are doing more than six or seven apps, which most of you are, and in this case, polygamy is totally legal. (Just don’t forget to change the college names if/when you do reuse an essay, by doing search all for the last college’s name and changing it to the current college. Telling Brown they are your one and only in an essay that you are reusing from Princeton, and in which you forget to swap Princeton out for Brown . . . yes, that is usually a deal breaker. Think it cannot happen? Listen to Rick Clark, Director of Undergraduate Admissions at Georgia Tech . . . by clicking here. It will take a few 2.5 minutes to get to Rick himself, and a couple of minutes to get to those who don’t proofread . . . ) .

Researching the U Chicago Essays, and Comparing it to a typical year’s Yale, Dartmouth and Any Other College that Wants You to Say Why You Want to Go There

That’s quite a subject heading, if I do say so myself. To kick off our research on essays, let’s start with a place that prides itself on its weirdness, at least when it comes to application essays: The University of Chicago.

Sure, for U Chicago this year, you have many options: you can write an alternate universe/speculative essay in which you are onboard a 13th-Century ship that suddenly sails off the edge of the world, or you can write an essay in which you consider the world from the point of view of a Mantis Shrimp, but the opening question for Chicago, which all applicants must respond to is this:

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.

Despite Chicago’s well-cultivated reputation for nonconformity, their Question 1 actually conforms pretty well to prompts used at hundreds of universities, including, so far this year, Yale, Dartmouth, Northwestern, U-Texas Austin, Tulane, Wisconsin-Madison and Indiana. Some ask for an essay on this in longer form, some want a shorter response in the 100 to 250-word range, but this kind of prompt shows up pretty often–call it the “Why Us” question, or the “What are You Planning To Do Here” question, and whether it says this or not, this “Tell Us What You Want to Study Here and What You Want To Do With That Knowledge” is always a two-part question.

One part is about you. The other part is about the university. Many applicants forget that, and either talk at length about themselves, showing no due diligence in researching the college itself, or they talk about the college without showing how they fit in–no school needs you to give it a research paper on itself, and no school that asks what they can offer you wants to hear only about you.

What to do?

Use that wonderful tool of the modern age, the search engine. That’s Google, to most of you, but even more than Google, it is the web site not just of the university in question, it is also the sites of each school and program within that university in which you might have an interest, and on down into what various departments are within each school, any associated labs, research arms, then on again into what is posted by individual professors, blogs, research projects and so on (nearly) ad infinitum.

What a question like this asks is what you want to learn and what you want to do with what you learn. Yes, that’s a lot to ask of somebody who, as I write this, has not even started the last year of high school yet, but that’s the point. And the best place to start on this kind of essay is to pick an important target school, dig in via the internet, dig more, then consider yourself.

After you have done this once, and written an essay, you will have what I call boilerplate–in this case, language about yourself and your interests that relates to the areas you researched in the essay–that you can reuse in other essays, and you will also have some specific reference points about the university.

Exactly what the balance should be between talking about yourself and talking about the university is a variable that depends on you and the exact wording of the prompt, but I usually find that this kind of essay has slightly more to quite a bit more about the student–but the references to and descriptions of the college are all the more important for being limited to some extent.

For a simple reason: showing that you know about them shows a degree of seriousness about the school. To put it in more human terms, you know a lot about the face of your beloved. For some additional, specific guidance on writing about U Chicago’s Question One for this year, click here: U Chicago Prompt One for 2020. We are now going on to take a look at Cornell:

Examples of Researching a University for the “What’s Your Major” or “What Makes You a Good Fit” Essay

So let’s start with an excerpt of an essay edit for an elite school, Cornell University, with my editing comments and some specific references-this is still in rough draft form, but you can already see how we are trying to cite specific detail on the school and drop some names:

I hope to interact with professors who have a passion for research and chemistry, such as Geoffrey Coates, whose research on catalysts includes new, biodegradable polymers, that might be used in biomedical devices—bringing my interests in surgery and chemistry together. Or, and Peng Chen, who has been applying single-molecule microscopy in a variety of fascinating ways, with applications that may range from solar power to medicine, the kind of thing that makes me wonder about powering medical implants with solar technology, hmm, a solar shirt that recharges a heart implant . . . my mind is on fire with ideas.

This section of the essay followed the introductory portion of the essay, where the writer reviewed her own life and interests, and how they developed and grew, until we reach a point where we pivot to specific things going on at that specific university. The app reader learns a bit more about you in general, but you also provide some bona fides by showing–or appearing to show–that you know a lot about the school.

Talk about your Demonstrated Interest: You, too, can click to see what Geoffrey Coates is up to, here: Coates Research. For Peng Chen, you would have to find his main page, here–Chen Research–do some reading, and click through two more layers to find out how his work relates to solar energy, here: Chen Solar. It’s the kind of reading and clicking that gets you to these details that will convince your app reader that you are serious about their school.

Yes, all of this may be just to name-drop twice in a single paragraph in a single application essay. But in an application game that is all about nuance and margins, paying attention to the details makes a lot of the difference. And that rough-draft, above, became a final draft that helped this particular student get admitted to that Ivy-League university. Not only that, some people I have worked with have, in fact, found their mission in life as they did this kind of research.

Researching the University of Southern California Supplemental Essays and Responses–-Tips and Links:

Sounds like a lot of work, and it is, which is why you want to start working on college essays early because, yes, they are actually research essays, in their own way. But let’s look at one more example, in which we just start clicking: U.S.C., and specifically the Viterbi School of Engineering. I am skipping U Chicago for the moment because I plan to revisit them again, in a separate post. You might want to follow my blog to get notice when I do.

So how to research an app essay for a potential engineering student at U.S.C.: Let’s say you just have an interest in engineering, but it is not, at sixteen or seventeen years of age, completely in focus. That’s okay. This exercise itself may help you get a focus, and if not, well, fake it ’til you make it.

So let’s start with the main page for Viterbi, which you can go ahead and click on, then have a look around, clicking and reading on whatever interests you, here: Viterbi Main.

Possibly you will find some stuff that interests you right away, in which case, click away. But in the case of my next example, knowing some of my client’s interests, I was able to suggest going to this page to search for manmade retina–I will have a specific link to a specific page below, but just type in ‘manmade retina’ here to see what happens:

Search: Manmade Retina

Here is where this student settled in to do some reading: Artificial Retina.

And here is how some of those references appear in a mid-stage essay draft on why this student wanted to go to U.S.C. and specifically the Viterbi School:

When I flew out from Georgia to visit USC last May, I loved the campus and diverse disciplines, like the school of gerontology— an unusual but absorbing subject for a young engineer who hopes to reverse the effects of aging–but the research being done at Viterbi particularly fascinated me. I will pursue experiences like learning under a former NASA employee and in an internship with real world applications. From perfecting the 3-D printing process using the MIP-SL technique to creating a manmade retina, Viterbi is at the forefront of innovation, which is exactly where I want to be in my own future.

This is part of an essay that was part of a successful application package for ‘S.C. The essay as a whole is just under the 250-word limit, and it begins on a personal note about how the applicants engineering interests started with a model rocket, then to a self-built telescope, then after the illness of a relative, the focus turned to more terrestrial concerns, which you can see manifested in that paragraph, above. In the essay as a whole, you have fewer than 100 words that reference truly specific information about the Viterbi School, but those words have impact because of their specificity and the way they fit into the context established by the personal focus of the introduction. Returning to my earlier point, the best essays of this sort offer insight into you, the applicant, and show that you have knowledge of, and insight into, the university–even if you just got it last night off the internet. Good internet research is good material for an essay.

Where to go from here? If you are interested in engineering at U.S.C., let’s just continue with that example. You are looking for specific areas of interest to you, and if you are not sure, see what does draw your interest, and your purpose is to get just a few examples and references to drop into your essay. Of course if you do happen to stumble upon your true mission in life–this does happen–as you click around, super. Don’t forget to mention my blog for getting you started when you collect your Nobel.

So let’s start by looking at the About page for Viterbi, and be sure to scroll down to see what lies below the banner and P.R. stuff at the top of the page: About Viterbi. Read and click on anything interesting.

Next, be sure to visit the Research and Innovation page, which also gives you a handy breakdown of divisions within the School of Engineering: Research and Innovation at Viterbi. Notice how you can use this to get an overview, as I just mentioned, but also to chase specific and intriguing ideas and areas–take a look, for example, at Research Centers. And maybe you had a biology or earth science teacher who introduced you to Climate Change, but maybe you turned aside, because, well, how depressing, not to mention Tech pays way better and an education at U.S.C. is expensive, (Or maybe not; more on that in another post, soon), but then you see this, while clicking on the Research Centers: Arid Climates and Water Research Center. And then within that, you keep clicking until you find a page on the people involved, like this: Watercenter About.

Then you click on a specific professor for the heck of it and find robots: Nora Ayanian. Then you start to think about what the heck robots have to do with water, which takes you back to their research page, which talks about robotics for monitoring water and suddenly you see where to go with your engineering career.

Or maybe not, but you’ve got some specific stuff to reference for your application essay. At the least.

So there you go. Notice what attracts you as you do some research, and start coming up with some language about things you’ve done and what inspires you to start the essay. Then get to where you name-drop learning from people like Assistant Professor Nora Ayanian, whose robots are probing the changing chemistry of the oceans even as I write these lines . . .

Good luck, and come back soon for more posts on this year’s application essays, data, and the scene as a whole.