An Example of UChicago's Uncommon Admissions Essay

The following is a successful example of the University of Chicago's famous supplemental essay (the "uncommon application," as it used to be called) that gained me admission to the University of Chicago in 2010, for the College Class of 2015. Years have since passed, but the essay still expresses the intellectual experience I hoped for, and found, at UChicago. I went on to graduate in 2015 with high honors in Fundamentals: Issues & Texts, Jewish Studies, and a minor in Philosophy. I then earned my MA in Philosophy at KU Leuven, in Belgium, before beginning my Ph.D. in intellectual history at Princeton. I hope you find the essay encouraging and helpful.

Essay Option 6: In the spirit of adventurous inquiry, pose your own question or choose one of our past prompts. Be original, creative, thought provoking. 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.

My Prompt: Draw upon the work of a favorite author to illustrate how something you’ve read has been realized in an influential life experience. (I opted for this over the admittedly enticing "find x.")

Tiger got to hunt,

Bird got to fly;

Man got to sit and wonder, "Why, why, why?"

Tiger got to sleep,

Bird got to land;

Man got to tell himself he understand.

— Proverb, Book of Bokonon, Cat’s Cradle (p. 81)

(Anthropology thesis of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. University of Chicago AM’71)

I am a Bokononist, fantastical and delusional, or at least I once was. Bokononism is a fictional religion forging the framework of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle, one of my favorites. Centered on the axiom that all faith is an illusion, Bokononism upholds the use of foma, or apparently harmless untruths, to ease the minds of its followers. It concedes the impossibility of fulfillment in life without some sort of faith–some sort of delusion. Ultimately, Bokononism is an intellectual, reflective ideology which graces humans’ animal limitations with our spiritual attempts to mask them.

I have lived most of my life thus far under the Bokononistic foma that I know something. As far back as I can remember, everyone has always said how swimmingly I am doing, how much I know. I even got through my summer college experience at Northwestern deluding myself with the notion that I had achieved some meaningful level of understanding about the world. The problem with this, as Vonnegut cynically suggests, is that our purpose is merely to fulfill our own expectations. Understanding is a self-fulfilling prophecy that conforms to our own vantages, a magical fish tank that stretches and shrinks to fit the figurative volume of our minds to match our own imaginations from the petty to the philosophical. It expands so that we remain necessarily small relative to the tank, lest we ever outgrow it and truly be content big fish.

For better or worse, the facade of understanding that previously contented me came crashing down at Harvard Summer School, theatrically crashing a hole in the side of the figurative fish tank that was my complacent mind. Harvard was my vin-dit, or sudden push in the direction of finding myself, and I saroon-ed or gave into that push. While both my summer programs at Northwestern and Harvard were conceptually similar, with high school students enrolled in regular classes at the university, Northwestern felt little-league in retrospect. Week upon week of the program, I found myself mindlessly following a group of other students who did not value intellectual exploration. Though I loved my classes and made lifelong friends, I walked away from the experience smiling from a whirlwind of social activity, not remembering whether I had learned much about myself or truly achieved “college level independence” as promised.

The Book of Bokonon illustrates the human tendency to claim to have seen what is on the other side of the hazy tank wall by pretending to understand the nuances of life, just as I did at Northwestern. Taking the metaphor more literally, if humans believing that they understand the world is just another animal instinct, then enlightenment is little more than a pit-stop between insoluble questions, a necessary but ultimately meaningless way of taking a sanity break. Such people are all around us; they are my wrang-wrangs. A wrang-wrang is a person who serves as a wake up call to others by showing what happens when a line of thinking is carried to its logical conclusion, in this case those who are intellectually content to understand at face value. I can’t blame them, for we can’t see through to the other side of our tank until we have thoroughly questioned where we already are, and even then we can only see through to a fraction of the gems on the other side. In hindsight, I was surrounded by them at Northwestern–people who didn’t see the value in sheer learning, who simply weren’t curious about life.

Unlike Northwestern CPP, Harvard Summer School was structured around independence and intellectual maturity. Unlike most, I was ready to take it on by myself, and to learn what it meant to make ones own choices, both academically and socially. Though I was at first fish out of water in such an intense and demanding environment, I circumstantially evolved in my understanding and became adept at terrestrial movement, developing a way of breathing in the ether outside my formerly sheltered waters. I went from being challenged by my environment to challenging it. I met a handful of people who have truly changed my life during that summer as I was thrown into a maelstrom of intellectualism. There, I played in an outstanding orchestra, explored New England, and spent countless hours pursuing dozens of different subject areas in the depths of Widener Memorial Library stacks until closing–and I had fun doing it.

The tigers in the poem have it easy. Perhaps there is always larger game to catch, but their satiation point remains the same, limiting how far they will go out for prey, for how long they will hunt. Likewise, humans compete over incomes, spouses, and signs of validation but we never achieve anything as fulfilling as the tiger’s meal due to the laws of both material and intellectual increasing expectations that come with success. We never land or catch our pray and sleep because we were made, as Vonnegut suggests, to question our surroundings–our meals and our flights–until we are through. This intellectual jousting becomes a figurative battle that will never end. Yet, we should not disappoint, for we were meant to embark on winding quests circling and circling our tanks until the right questions are asked and the tank expands to reveal even more probing uncertainties. Harvard led me on those winding quests, quite often literally through the ten floors of Widener library, and socially through the flurry of events I attended without knowing anyone, always ending up with a new favorite book or friend.

I now consider myself an academic in that no amount of learning ever brings me back to that blindly contented stage, though I love the pursuit more than ever before. Every speck of information I hear on NPR or on some tangent in class meets another frayed wire and sparks to some former time, life experience, person, classroom, ad infinitum– never quite “landing” as the bird could. A right answer in class is met with magnetism for the ten answers I don’t know. Ways of constructing thoughts differently, emphasis on the seemingly semantic have woven me into an intellectual knot that would appear to be devouring itself. Nevertheless, I have found myself through experiential study as Bokononists find themselves through boko-maru, the intimate act of prolonged physical contact between the naked soles of two persons’ feet.

The seemingly nonsensical Cat’s Cradle is at its core an anthropological masterpiece. It addresses primordial questions of human purpose, the innermost limits of human perception, and the decisive value of our attempts to make meaning in the world. It asks those integral questions about why we seek answers, experiment, and ultimately learn, all in the context of our biological existence as animals. Simply put, my quest is to understand more about human kind: our origins and cultures via anthropology, our recording of that existence via history, and our cultural representations of those ideas via literature. Yet, intellectual satiation is possible only under the foma of understanding. Where or when we stop questioning, only time will tell. Thus far, I’ve got a long way to go: the human story is a long one, and it’s still being written.

An Uncommon College Experience

Recent post comments have asked me to post about my experience as a first-year at the University of Chicago. Having completed my first quarter, I think I’m finally prepared to share that. I’m now stocked with my own photos of campus and personal exposure to the university that just months ago existed to me mostly on paper.

To give you a general outline of my life at UChicago, I’m a first-year living in Dodd-Mead House in Burton-Judson Courts. I’m currently taking required Humanities and Social Science Core sequences, as well as Latin and humanities electives. Outside of the classroom, I’m in several reading groups and academic clubs, a writer for The Chicago Maroon and College website, and an after-school philosophy coach for neighborhood students through the Civic Knowledge Project.

After visiting campus many times my senior year for various campus events, my residential experience here officially began in late September with Orientation Week, known here as “O-week.” First-year students move into their houses one week before classes begin and have a chance to get to know their fellow classmates and the University more broadly. It’s an unusually social time for students here, many of whom don’t typically come out of their shells or have “family time” with their housemates. With O-week began my praise of the (Harry-Potter-style) House system, which provides a great group of friends with which to attend campus events, explore Chicago, and generally relax with outside of class.

Student life at UChicago is constantly buzzing with various activities, both on and off campus. These are the perfect compliment to academic life. In just this past week, I’ve attended two career events; four club meetings; three public lectures on topics ranging from economics to religion; attended a school-sponsored Lascivious Ball (I’ll let the name speak for itself); and taken advantage of Chicago by exploring Chinatown with my house and seeing the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and Art Institute of Chicago. I also have to plug queer life here, which is very well established on campus and, like everything at UChicago, has a definite intellectual slant that refreshingly defies many queer stereotypes. Generally, student life here has a lot to offer if one is proactive and takes advantage of it. It’s often tough to balance everything, but I love penciling exciting new events into my calendar each week.

Though extra-curricular life has certainly been eye-opening, the deeper transformation occurred in my classes this past quarter, which were unlike any I had taken before. The Humanities and Social Science Core have truly changed the way I think and write after just one quarter. Both of these sequences examine great books without the “slant” with which traditional classes approach a work. As a quote engraved in Harper Memorial Library summarizes the College's Great Books approach: “Read not to believe or contradict, but to weigh and consider.”

The closest thing to the Core I have taken before are two Freshman Seminars at Harvard, which it turns out have little in common with my current classes. Freshman Seminars at Harvard (and most other colleges, from my understanding) approached a specific topic with a faculty expert and focused almost exclusively on the course material. Core classes are nearly the opposite; the texts we read are springboards into more universal topics. Discussions regularly descend into fundamental philosophical debates to the likes of Plato and Aristotle in Raphael’s The School of Athens.

In accordance with the Socratic method, Core class discussions aren’t guided to a specific destination, but that doesn’t make them flimsy. Comments are expected to be relevant, insightful, and almost always to reference a specific passage in the text. This classroom method of claims, evidence, warrants, and counter-claims is meant to work hand-in-hand with the expectations for academic writing at Chicago, which are emphasized from the very beginning in an additional peer writing seminar which students must pass as part of their Humanities Core. The seminars themselves get mixed reviews from students, but the general theme is central to the College’s academic mission: critical inquiry and precise means of argument are the backbone to any liberal arts education. Professor Wendy Doniger described that philosophy most aptly in an anecdote she read for Convocation one year:

Once when I returned to Hyde Park after a long trip abroad, I dashed off to the Co- op, of blessed memory, to restock the larder. As I waited to check out, I overheard the conversation of two undergraduates standing in line in front of me. “No,” said one to the other, “but that’s not what Aristotle meant by that.” “Ah,” I thought with a happy sigh, “I’m home.” It was not merely the subject of their debate—Aristotle, the poster boy of the Common Core—that identified them as my people, but the style in which they were debating, the contentiousness of their discourse. That intellectual style is one of the things for which the University of Chicago is justly famous, our cultivation of the hawk eye that pounces on the unexamined assumption, the false logical link, the shoddy piece of evidence. And we are right to be proud of that training.

—Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School, June 2008 Convocation Speech entitled “Thinking More Critically About Thinking Too Critically”

In writing this post, I re-read my review of UChicago from my first visit in 2009. My understanding of the University has changed greatly since then, to say the least. For one, I was then a believer in the self-deprecating slogan, “The University of Chicago: Where fun comes to die.” I saw Chicago then as extremely niche and a college experience defined by the sacrifice of social life and non-academic activities. (Never mind that my house currently sells mugs bearing a picture of Cobb gate with the inscription "Abandon all hope... Ye who enter here," playing on the O-week photo above.) Though these characterizations aren’t "wrong," they’re fundamentally misguided in that they attempt to squeeze Chicago into a narrow box. On the contrary, Chicago’s best attribute is its resistance to such oversimplifications via its emphasis on free speech and its diverse modes of inquiry. A perfect example of this is the "Aims of Education" speech delivered to my Class of 2015 during O-week. The speech was from a statistician who presented real-world data in the form of charts and graphs with little interpretation, thus deliberately leaving it up to us to determine how it related to education in our small discussion groups following the talk.

A summer job application recently asked me to share “what I considered my greatest achievement and why.” I thought really seriously about this question for days. In the end, I felt that listing an accomplishment or award from high school would really just be resting on my laurels, which is something I try to avoid on principle. It occurred to me then that my greatest accomplishment in life thus far is that I ultimately chose the University of Chicago for my college experience. I have never been more proud of a decision in my life. Having visited over twenty top colleges, many of which provide a significantly "happier" college experience, I've had my share of reservations and doubts. (To the like of Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice, be warned that the more colleges you visit, the more objects you will have for comparison. You thus run the risk of being less satisfied with the one you finally choose!) Yet, my doubts have fully dissipated, and, as it turned out, I knew what I wanted from the very beginning, when I first visited UChicago in summer 2009.

I chose the most challenging institution I came across from the over two-dozen that I visited. The one that–from day one–fanned my sense of curiosity, made me question and defend my ideas, and promised no “easy way out.” The University of Chicago's motto–Crescat scientia; vita excolatur, or Let knowledge grow from more to more; and so be human life enriched–means more to me than ever before. Being a part of what has been called "The Great American University" has taken my life, not just my education, that much closer to where I want it to be. As my professors and peers here have shown me in equal part, that symbiotic journey of intellectual and personal discovery, however grueling, is one worth embarking on.

Reviewed: How to Win at College

In my off-time this summer, I've put a lot of thought into what I want out of college. There are a lot of typically expected things, sure: to find my academic passion, to make friends for life, to be exposed to a diverse population and, of course, to become smarter. How does one manage such daunting objectives in the midst of the excitement and pressure of freshman year? Plan ahead, stay focused, and process your life in small, manageable steps.

So says Cal Newport in his now widely accepted book How to Win at College: Surprising Secrets for Success from the Country's Top Students. I have long been a follower of Newport's blog, Study Hacks, on which Newport, via interviews with and studies of a diverse group of successful individuals, attempts to "decode success" into concise patterns. How to Win at College covers much the same territory and proves to be, unlike so much other speculation on the topic, truly useful. Advice in the book is taken from hundreds of successful students at a wide variety of schools all over the country (from Harvard to the University of Arizona). Additionally, Newport knows a thing or two about college success himself. At the time of the book's writing, he was a computer science PhD student at MIT after graduating from Dartmouth Phi Beta Kappa (roughly top 10% of the class). As an incoming first-year at a school notorious for a heavy-to-unmanageable workload, I decided that this book had to make my summer reading list.

At first glance, many of this book's "secrets" sound like common sense. Start your work well in advance, don't rest on your laurels, think positive, and don't stress, right? The problem is, most of us don't do these things unless we're trained to. We assume that top students never leave the library and have horribly stressful lives. We assume that Rhodes Scholars had no social presence in college and that we could never aspire to an achievement that impossible. Worst of all, we assume that studying harder is the key to success. Newport dispels these misconceptions by clarifying that studying better is what we're really after, and that merely working harder at anything is a one-way ticket to a stressful, friendless, all-nighter-fueled college experience. On the contrary, top students are the ones who are not stressed because they have the best study habits and constantly feel in control of their own lives. The effect of this control is to boost students' ambitions. Rather than struggling to merely "get by" in their classes, these students now have time to work internships, do freelance writing, and get research published in their free time.

The book is organized into 75 useful rules for self-discipline and building ambition. Newport starts with an intentionally jaw-dropping

Don't do all of your reading (tip number 1)

that I can only see as a tool for selling books on controversy. Yet, this claim has a purpose that's central to Newport's methodology: do what you can in the limited amount of time, and you'll maximize your outcomes. Rather than staring blankly at your biology textbook, from which you are expected to read 40 pages by tomorrow, skim the text and take down the main points in half the time. During tomorrow's lecture, fill-in the missing notes during class.

In the category of de-stressing the college experience, Newport advocates forming a system of personal accountability that precludes procrastination. Students should start long-term projects the day they are assigned and break them into useful pieces, so that one always feels productive. Set daily goals for chipping away at long-term assignments and "record your efforts in a work-progress journal" (52), thus keeping yourself accountable. This feeds into another useful strategy of "setting arbitrary deadlines" (58) to keep yourself on track. Little steps like using a filing cabinet (68) and "emptying your in-box at the end of each day" (71) help keep your life in order and generally minimize the stress of disorganization. Tips like "not taking breaks from work between classes" (65) and "doing schoolwork every day of the week" (34) maintain one's academic momentum.

Yet, as intense and study-centric as the book's title may seem, How to Win at College also centers on having a rewarding life experience in college, suggesting that students

"Make friends your #1 priority" (tip number 44)

Additional tips include "seeking out fun" (53), "laughing every day" (50), and "staying in touch with friends" from home (37). Newport illustrates a social life that is rewarding and rich without wasting precious time. Far from the "work hard, play hard" system of raging on the weekends and cramming every weeknight, Newport's system is designed to give you the best of both worlds without sacrifice one's sanity. Academic and social lives no longer have to compete on the spectrum of lazy to stressed. Keeping your academic goals in center-view actually makes time for your social life without generating stress. There's a sort of mutual respect between these equally important components of life that I will surely take to heart once my classes start.

All of that's fine, but it only shows the reader the tools to being successful, not getting quite to the root of what got successful people where they are. By far the most overarching component of Cal Newport's philosophy is his insistence on challenge: setting ambitious goals, and always having a plan to achieve them. Some tips that stood out on this turf are to "always be working on a grand project" (16), to "seek out phenomenal achievers" (47), and to "do one thing better than anyone you know" (11). These are the steps that make up the difference between truly successful, groundbreaking individuals and what Newport dubs "grinds": people who work and work but lack that interesting spark. Ultimately, a burning ambition is what separates those who do phenomenal things in college from those who just get by. If your highest dream is to win a Pulitzer, take the steps to get there and don't settle for being average. Constant goal setting and the achievements that follow will only boost you onto loftier ambitions and destinations to come. Maybe winning at college is less about working hard and more about dreaming hard than you ever imagined.

College Summer Programs for High School Students

As my own college-search winds down, I wanted to share one of the most important experiences outside of high school that got me to where I am today: college summer programs. I hope that sharing my own experiences with these programs will open some new doors for students in the college search. Ultimately, summer programs are an excellent opportunity for students to develop their academic resumes, prepare for the social environment of college, and get a grasp of what sort of college they might like to attend. (I apologize in advance: I'm a sucker for dreamy college view-book photos of library steps, outdoor classes et al.).

Throughout middle school, I attended two week professional conferences in business and law, which essentially proved to be little more than takes on the typical summer camp. Though these give students a decent sense of what certain career paths might offer thems, these programs are still run like summer camps, and students aren't given the academic or social freedom that will prepare them for college. For the summer after my sophomore year, I decided to look into more demanding programs by searching on the internet. Of the few programs I came across that actually offered college credit, Northwestern's College Preparation Program (CPP) program and the University of Chicago Summer Session sounded the most interesting, and I decided to apply. These schools were also close enough to home that I even considered commuting (but decided to live on campus for the full experience, more on this later). The application consisted of a short essay using the Common Application prompts and a preliminary course selection. This got me thinking about what to study, and I had a lot of difficulty making my final choices.

Though I was initially fixated on a dual-credit economics course, I realized that I could just take this course at my high school for free, and I decided to branch out to courses that would be unique opportunities, ultimately choosing "fundamentals of anthropology" and "global history: 1914-1991." This was one of the best decisions I have made, as these courses broadened my horizons dramatically from previously being set on economics and business. The following summer, I went for a very similar program: Harvard Summer School, in which I enrolled in two freshman seminars: "the Holocaust in history, literature, and film" at the divinity school, and "utopia and anti-utopia" in the English department.

Though Northwestern was a great opportunity and the courses were academically stimulating, the sheer quality of teaching between Harvard and Northwestern was leagues apart. My courses were the same size at each institution, both extremely small (ranging from 5-12), but the format of the classrooms was entirely different. Even though my anthropology class at Northwestern had only 7 students, it was still taught as a lecture by PowerPoint, and discussion was not facilitated. I realized after the program that next time, rather than focusing solely on the content of courses, I had to find courses with the the classroom format I really wanted: small, discussion-based seminars. Harvard provided just that though freshman seminars, which are designed to give incoming students experience in college level courses and are required of all Harvard College freshman. The classroom experience was second to none, with top scholars enthusiastically “re-learning” the material with the class and often taking time to meet with us outside of class.

Switching gears, I also wanted to discuss the residential and social components of the summer programs I’ve done. The courses really aren’t everything, though the programs are pitched as such. The real magic is the coupling of fantastic academic opportunities with a residential program that allows a student to relax and do that amount of work on his or her own schedule (thus my problem with commuting). At Northwestern, I found myself fairly distracted socially and didn’t quite get the same in depth experience I got at Harvard, where I was much more focused. I think this is due to Northwestern having a very active camp-like program feel, with a check-in meeting every night and an enforced curfew.

Harvard, on the other hand, offered me complete independence, which, though at first overwhelming, really pushed me to branch out socially and figure out my work/life balance (just as one does in college). Where Northwestern’s program added a certain social pressure to get out and enjoy the summer, Harvard allowed me the freedom to invest in my courses (for those of you who are curious, that’s 21 books in 7 weeks and a 23 page final research paper) while also living the social life I wanted. A weekday consisted of about 8 hours of reading (my only homework, given the nature of my courses), three hours of class, and still always some time in the afternoon to sit outside and read or meet someone for FroYo in Cambridge. At Harvard (as at Northwestern), I also participated in the summer school orchestra, which was an amazing experience in and of itself. The summer school program at Harvard also provided great outside opportunities, from weekly house cookouts, to outings all over New England, to a college fair, to dances, to our own "iron chef" competition.

What Harvard taught me (among other things):
1. What it means to really love learning
2. To find a social-academic balance that worked for me (without external pressures at work)
3. The wonders of a self-imposed (midnight) bedtime on weeknights
4. To build spontaneity into my life while maintaining long term priorities
5. The bigger the library, the better

And I’m going back for more. Why not (financial aid providing*)? I’ve decided to enroll in Yale University’s summer session to study philosophy in the courses “happiness” and “free will, good, and evil.” Living in a residential college should also give me a glimpse of what housing will be like at UChicago next fall, though I‘m admittedly most excited for the once-in-a-lifetime courses that should help me decide if I want to attend divinity school after college.

The best database of summer programs is linked here, complete with student reviews, to help you search for the program right for you. As you will see, almost all highly selective universities (especially the Ivies) offer summer programs open to high school students. I've applied to a good number of programs, so (as always) feel free to message me with any questions!

*A note about cost: these summer programs are prohibitively expensive, just like real college, and I get that. My take on this is that, financial aid, even if just a minor discount, can make the program of a lifetime a real possibility, and it did for me. Keep in mind when you see the tuition costs that  you are paying for actual credit from these institutions, and that credit may transfer to (or at least offer placement at) the college you end up attending.

The Choice Has Been Made

After years of visiting dozens of colleges, sitting through far too many standardized tests, worrying about report cards, spending countless nights exploring reviews on Unigo.com in the wee hours of the morning, and boring my friends and family with long-winded rants about which college may be right for me, I have finally chosen a college. After a great deal of deliberation over my winter break, I sent my deposit to the University of Chicago on December 31st, just in time to have an anxiety-free 2011 with no more waiting.

As an accepted student in (likely) the most competitive class year to date, I am feeding what one education blog calls Chicago's "institutional ego" to become more on par with schools like Harvard or Stanford as far as prestige is concerned. Following up from my most recent post on application inflation, Chicago is the school most in the spotlight right now because it is moving up the prestige ranks (ironically determined by rejection rate) at an alarming pace. To put the school's growing competitiveness in perspective, a Chicago Maroon article detailing last year's admission season noted the fact that in 1993, the year of my birth, Chicago's acceptance rate was 77%. That means that during my short lifetime, this institution has become more than four times more selective. Harvard, by comparison has become roughly twice as selective in this same time period.

Is this the reason I chose Chicago? No. But this news is strongly correlated with what did draw me to the school as perhaps its greatest resource: a brilliant, engaging undergraduate population that I know will challenge me to become all that I can be.

The question then arises: how did I know that I would fit in with Chicagoans? A few reasons:

1. They accepted me. As strange as it may sound, I have long been prepared for rejection from this unique intellectual community. If I wasn't meant to be part of it, I would not have received an offer of acceptance, and I would have found my place elsewhere. The institution wanting me made me want it.

2. I had a fantastic time on my overnight visit. I discovered that life at Chicago had the social-academic balance I wanted in my college experience. This was made clearest by the house system (like that in Harry Potter) enhancing the academic experience I got from classroom visits.

3. The Facebook group for class of 2015 admitted students has been an extremely compelling advocate for my choice. I have, in two short weeks of this community existing, met several people I would consider true friends. Discussion questions on the forum such as "what is your favorite fruit?" turned quickly from taste to world history to literary devices and ended in foreign languages. I love the intellectual energy so apparent in what would be my future classmates. (Interestingly, it has also been noted that as the entering class becomes more selective from year to year, the Facebook group discussions have become more lively.)

4. Compared to the small liberal arts colleges I have been considering alongside Chicago, notably Swarthmore, I felt that Chicago could encompass the small school feel if I wanted it via the house system breaking up the undergraduate population into small families of around 40-100 students. Meanwhile, Chicago's unique position as a research institution (8th in the world) coupled with the "best undergraduate academic experience" in the nation (Princeton Review, 2007) provides me with the community feeling I want with room built in for the spontaneity that defines the college experience.

5. I just felt that it was right for me, and that I wouldn't regret the choice. It's obviously not a perfect institution, but it was one where I felt that I could work around the schools weaknesses.



Thank you for all of your support along my personal journey towards both finding the college right for me and being admitted to it. I can't tell you how many complimentary emails and comments from bloggers have made my day. On the sculpture picture below (Cobb gate), I have made it passed the admissions committee (the dragon gargoyle at the base) and am officially a puny first year, bound to metaphorically struggle up the slope until I have completed my fourth year, at which time I will apparently sprout wings and proudly fly out into the real world.

But it's not time for goodbye, and my work here isn't over yet. In the coming months, I plan on exploring and perfecting my own study habits in preparation for my college experience, inspired by what productivity genius Cal Newport has done on his own blog, Study Hacks.

Now, please excuse me while I dump out three file cabinets of college view-books and donate my Princeton Review books to the next generation of college searching students.

Application Inflation: When Is Enough Enough?

Congratulations to me! I pressed submit on my Early Action applications to the University of Chicago and Boston College, and now I'm back to blogging after weeks of essay revisions consuming my free time.

Allen Grove at About.com recently posted about the volume of applications students are sending in To How Many Colleges Should I Apply?, and it got me thinking about how I'm contributing to the admissions fad "more is better" in terms of application numbers.

To quote Grove, "NACAC, the National Association for College Admission Counseling, recently published their report on the "State of College Admission 2010." The study showed that in 2009, 75% of students submitted three or more applications; 23% submitted seven or more applications. Those numbers have been creeping up over the past couple of decades as the number of college-bound students has increased and online applications have made applying easier."

I am one of those 23% of applicants referenced as applying to more than seven colleges, so I feel some obligation to explain that to the adults and peers who constantly ask me "why so many?" The basic reason for me is that the colleges I'm interested in all happen to be highly selective. No matter how qualified you are, if one in four applicants are admitted at your "target schools," there's room for doubt of admission, and so my list has grown slightly out of precaution.

A fantastic article  titled Application Inflation: When is Enough Enough? was just released today by Eric Hoover, a writer for The Chronicle, the leading publication on higher education, in conjunction with the New York Times. Beginning with the question of why the number of applications institutions receive seems to be edging higher each year, Hoover looks into a few powerful examples of college marketing campaigns and their effects on drastically increased application numbers.

The first example on the table is the University of Chicago, which experienced an unbelievable 43% increase in applications last year. This change is attributed to multiple factors, namely the introduction of Jim Nondorf (formerly at Yale and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) as Dean of Admissions for the College, the school's adoption of the Common Application over their formerly "uncommon" application, and the extensive use of a marketing firm to attract more students to campus.

Students and alumni from Chicago have complained that the marketing campaign has transformed Chicago from an interesting place that drew in niche students into a more generic imitation of what a college should be, all in the name of drawing in more applicants. While Chicago used to pride in its eccentricity and deviation from the admissions norm, it now seems to be chasing averages.

So why are colleges embarking on multi-million dollar spending sprees to lure in more applicants, many paying the college board 32 cents per name, only to reject an overwhelming majority of those who apply? Many colleges claim that an increasing volume is a must in today's competitive market as an indication of institutional growth, and that increasing selectivity boosts everything from the college's credit score to alumni giving to their U.S. News Ranking, if only insignificantly.

The benefits  of bringing in more applications are dubious at best. There are many downsides to increasing application volumes as well, taken most seriously Georgetown, a school which has chosen to keep off the Common Application to keep its applicants down to those most dedicated to attending the school. It additionally wishes to provide an interview to each applicant, which it wouldn't be able to do if the college switched to the Common Application and application volume shot up double digits each year.

As Hoover's article illustrates, the debate for quantity over quantity isn't limited to paper; it affects the students who are ultimately hurt by these admissions tactics. He recounts the story of a minority applicant who was urged to apply by Harvard:

A Harvard representative contacted Sally Nuamah her junior year of high school in Chicago. Ms. Nuamah had good grades but an ACT score she describes as low. Her parents, who came from Ghana, had little money. As she welcomed the admissions rep into her living room one day, she was nervous. “I was like, ‘Oh, goodness, I don’t want to disappoint anyone,’ ” she says.
Ensuing conversations brought mixed emotions. “I felt that I was pushed and given motivation,” she says, “but on the other hand, I wondered if what they were telling me was feasible.” She knew her scores were below the average for Harvard students. Nonetheless, she applied. Months later, a rejection letter came.

Ultimately, it is a sad reality that a majority of these added applications each year are from under-qualified applicants who have no chance of being admitted, only of feeding the admissions frenzy of annually increasing volumes of applications and associated costs. However, as a current applicant myself, I see no alternative but to feed the fire until I receive some acceptance letters a few months down the road.

College Essays: from Writing to Revising

This is as crucial a time for me as it is for all of you Seniors. I've been reading about the application process for years, and now my first deadline is less than a month away. Panic? Not really - that was for junior year. I've ultimately learned how to control that inevitable anxiety about the process by doing things early and learning to objectively critique my own application and essays.

I've now written my main Common App essay, main supplemental essay that I'll be sending in a few applications, and my personal statement via the Common App's "additional information" section. "How are you managing?" people ask. Basically, I'm setting optimistic deadlines for my essays, teacher recommendations, and mountains of paperwork that come with this process. Now I have everything done... in rough form. I feel really relieved to have all of my essays at least started, even if I haven't edited them yet. The ideas are there, and I now have time to go back and revise, to help explain myself through these essays by connecting the thoughts and making sure everything makes sense.

I'm now onto stage two of the writing process: revising. As simple as this may sound, it's not just checking for grammar like you've likely gotten through high school doing: it's mapping your essay in an outline, making sure every point makes sense and logically flows from the one before it. The only way to be able to see this level of individual-point analysis is to start seeing things objectively. For me, this means putting at least two or three days between when you first spill out your ideas from when you next attempt to edit. You really need to pay attention to how you're telling the story, and not making any assumptions about what the reader already knows. This is really challenging, so if you haven't developed that eye for objectivity, give the essay to one of your parents, siblings, or friends to read. Chances are, you've skipped some logical links.

 I have linked below some really helpful blog posts from Brown University's Admissions Office Blog, and I would really suggest reading them. One point I love that helps with objective analysis is to outline your essay after you've written it to see if it met the criteria you wanted to get across when you started writing. What does it say about you? How could you tie in more information about yourself to make the essay resonate with and compliment your resume and transcript? The post on choosing a topic is really helpful also: there really aren't any cliché or exhausted topics, but there are definitely dull and typical ways to write about them. The post asks you to objectively ask yourself what the topic (and subsequent essay) says that makes you stand out from the applicant pool, and helps the admissions office see what you would contribute to the campus.

From the Brown University Admissions Office Blog, Prospects and Providence:
Getting a Personal: The Writing Process
Getting Personal - Choosing a Topic
The Personal Statement in Context

One thing I love about the Brown Admissions Office Blog, Prospects and Providence, is that their writers are real admissions officers at one of the most selective universities in the world, and yet they don't come off as intimidating. Everything is written to help the applicant, especially in terms of stress management and taking a really hazy process and breaking it down in to manageable pieces. As a final note, I couldn't agree with them more about their approach to taking the essays in context (the last article). Your essays are important, but try to focus more on ideas than writing at first, and everything will fall into place. The essay is ultimately just another tool for the admissions to learn about you, so put in the time and show off your skills. Embrace them and start writing and revising, seniors!

P.S. Hope you had an awesome Harry Potter Homecoming, BHS!

College Admissions Office Blogs

Some of you have probably gotten emails from colleges of interest with a link to the school's own "admissions office blog" to help you get to know the office/college. Some posts are silly, some are serious, but they all help to provide hints as to what the officers are looking for and speak to the vibe on campus.

Some blogs like UChicago's "The Uncommon Blog" are all over the place, with multiple authors writing off-key, sometimes whimsical, mostly intellectual posts about their very diverse and fulfilling pursuits at Chicago. Recent posts range from "Transformers descend on Chicago" about the upcoming movie's filming in Chicago, to "Summer Research" following some exciting projects.


Other college admissions office blogs are much like my own: attempts to clarify the college admissions and selection process. Blogs from Tufts and Dartmouth offer really useful information with a lot of outside info on student life and stories of memorable applications the counselors have seen.

Here are some of my favorite college admissions office blogs (some more active than others):

University of Chicago - The Uncommon Blog
Swarthmore College - Parrish Beach Patrol
Brown University - Prospects and Providence
Perspectives from Dartmouth Admissions
Vanderbilt University - The Vandy Admissions Blog
Tufts University - TuftsBlogs
MIT - Admissions Blog

The Importance of Campus Atmosphere

Everyone always wants to know how important the demographic of students on campus is. Well, coupled with the location of the school, it can greatly define one's college experience, as I've experienced firsthand through my two six week pre-college programs. That reassuring proverb endlessly spewed by adults "you'll find your niche anywhere" or "people everywhere are pretty much the same and you'll find your crowd" now seem incredibly uninformed to me.

I use Northwestern as an example of a school that simply didn't fit with my personality. When I first arrived on campus for my pre-college program two summers ago, I was wowed by its historic, prestigious feeling, and I soon came to love its natural beauty and proximity to Chicago, not to mention it's awesome location in Evanston. This satisfaction soon changed once I began the second week of classes (anthropology and history) and we were still solely in lecture format, even though my classes had only 5 and 12 other students respectively. There was zero class involvement in either of my classes, and after class my professors promptly got up and left, not leaving room for questions or discussion. I was simply disappointed that for so much money, my education was what one would expect from a community college class. For that much money, I now expect the intimacy provided only by extremely wealthy universities who can provide an intimate liberal arts experience (think Ivies) and small liberal arts colleges themselves.

In addition to academic disappointments, the social environment slowly grew more taxing on me. Though I at first loved the lively nature of eventful nights and sporadic trips into Chicago, this lifestyle really started to drag on my studies, and things became so social that I had very little time to study. I realized that the school was just not compatible with my priorities: most people there really wanted a 50/50 balance of work and play, as opposed to my 70/30 preference. On top of that, play at Northwestern consisted of things like going to the beach and joining Greek life, rather than doing something intellectual like going to a museum or play, which is much more valuable to me.

Thus, in terms of both academic focus and social scene, Northwestern simply did not fit my personality. I later realized that most people who graduate from Northwestern go into pre-professional fields like business or medicine rather than intellectual pursuits such as going into academia or further graduate school. This is a minor distinction to make, but I think it really has a huge impact on the academic experience. People who love learning and want to continue learning for the rest of their lives choose small liberal arts schools or more intense universities that are more focused on the intimate, genuine academic experience and don't go to large, state universities or schools like Northwestern.

Harvard provided a completely different environment that was much more compatible with my personality. Specifically, Harvard had a much more academically intense student body that had a much more valuable balance of work and play. This meant that I never felt pressured to skip out on work like I did at Northwestern, and I could really be myself much more with friends taking the time to do meaningful studying and just going out  for fun on nights and weekends. Students were also much more interesting, and the things we did outside of class were extremely engaging but also intellectual, whether it meant seeing a noir movie, stopping in one of Harvard's many free museums, or wasting away hours exploring the COOP bookstore.

Ultimately, I want you to leave with the message that student demographic does matter. College should be an experience to facilitate your existing personality and interests, throwing in some twists along the way as you find yourself. It should not be a vastly different and uncomfortable experience where you are constantly fighting your environment, even if it's only in small ways like I realize I now was at Northwestern. Campus visits are the best way to gauge the priorities and general demographic a school has, but guides like Barron's Guide to the Most Competitive Colleges, the Fiske Guide to Colleges, and the Princeton Review's Best 373 Colleges guides are a great way to get a feel of how a school falls on the study-hard/party-hard spectrum and should help you find the place that will really speak to your personality.

College Rankings: the right way to rank

When most people (and colleges) reference a college's "ranking," they're typically referring to U.S. News & World Report rankings that have been running steady since 1983 and have helped to transform a once moderate admissions process into one that's far more competitive and stressful, both for colleges and applicants. But that's old news on an old topic I've written about before.

I want to share with you a few other means of ranking colleges that will hopefully help some applicants prioritize their lists and get a better picture of the school that fits their priorities. Take these sources of information loosely, as studies like the Wall Street Journal and Ph.D. study have pretty small data sizes and the difference between 4th and 12th place might be less than a 5% difference. The general idea is that even making it on these rankings should be impressive.

The Wall Street Journal "Top 50 Feeder Schools" is a list of colleges that send the highest percentage of graduates to Ivy League and other top law, business, and medical graduate schools. I like that the list includes liberal arts colleges and gives you a good picture of how successful very small colleges are at producing successful graduates. Most of the rankings are as you would expect; Harvard, Yale, and Princeton take the top three, but there are some small colleges like Williams (5) and Pomona (13) that also prove that they have a formidable reputation in graduate school's eyes. I think this is a great reminder to go to the school that fits you best, even if it is a tiny liberal arts college that no one has heard of, and a testament to the idea that names don't always mean everything.

Another metric I like to use is the percentage of graduates who go on to get a Ph.D. Again, merely making the list is a really impressive indicator of academic excellence. These rankings are nice in that you can look up individual departments to see what schools have strong programs for a given major. Especially for those of you looking to go onto non-professional graduate school, to something like English or Physics, these rankings would be a great source to reference even if not for a Ph.D. Another trend that has helped me a lot is that this figure tends to be associated with how intellectual or nerdy a college environment is, so there is definitely a lot to work with out of this study.

The Forbes magazine rankings "America's Best Colleges" uses a similar approach to U.S. News & World Report but uses slightly different weighting and factors that make these rankings more about value and educational quality versus U.S. News's emphasis on endowment and reputation. They based 25 percent of their rankings on seven million student evaluations of courses and instructors, as recorded on the web site RateMyProfessors.com. Another 25 percent depended upon how many of the school’s alumni, adjusted for enrollment, are listed among the notable people in Who’s Who in America. The other half of the ranking was based equally on three factors: the average amount of student debt at graduation held by those who borrowed; the percentage of students graduating in four years; and the number of students or faculty, adjusted for size, who have won nationally competitive awards like Rhodes Scholarships or Nobel Prizes.

Rankings are never a sole criterion on which to choose a certain school over another, but these metrics are really user friendly and have done a lot of the deciding work for you; take advantage of them!

P.S. Try making your own ranking at StudentsReview that's customized based on what matters to you. Additionally, the Princeton Review allows you to look up colleges you're already interested in to see where they ranked on the publication's most recent lists such as "best campus dining" or "students study the most."

Great College Lists and Profiles from Allen Grove

August 11, 2010

Allen Grove of About.com runs a great college admissions blog for About.com that I consider to be top tier, along with Jacques Steinberg's New York Times Education blog: The Choice. One of the best features on Allen Grove's site is the "starter lists" he makes akin to the "best and worst" lists the Princeton Review's college guides are famous for. I find these lists really useful when sorting between the over two thousand four year undergraduate programs in the country; Grove brings lesser-known colleges really worth considering to life in his short lists and convenient descriptions. Furthermore, Grove has an unbelievable grasp of the American higher education system as a whole and offers great application and admissions advice.

20 Most Selective Colleges
Ivy League Schools
Top Catholic Colleges and Universities
Top Liberal Arts Colleges and 20 More Great Liberal Arts Colleges
Top Public Liberal Arts Colleges
Top Public Universities
Top Undergraduate Business Schools
Top Undergraduate Engineering Universities  and Top Engineering Colleges
Top Universities and 10 More Great Universities
Top Women's Colleges

Also of note are Groves's lists of "top picks by state" which break down great schools by geography. I hope you Illinoisians will appreciate the "Top Illinois Colleges" page!

The Common Application is live, Class of 2011!

The Common Application went up on August 1st, 2010 for the High School class of 2011 who will be entering college in the fall of 2011. Don't tell me you haven't been waiting all summer for this moment... maybe just me! In any case, the Common App is now legitimate, so you can add the schools you're interested in applying to, get all of the address/family/education background questions out of the way, and find out the fees and supplemental applications associated with each college. If you haven't done so, register for an account now so that you can start taking advantage of the resources the Common App makes available, even though most applications aren't due until November (early programs) or January (regular decision).

As far as opportunities to get started on your essays before school starts, this is the time to start! I would recommend that everyone work on the required Common App "pesonal essay" first, and then go on to school specific supplemental essays, which are unique to each college and will only be read by that particular school.

This year's Common App essay choices are as follows:

Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.
Discuss some issue of personal, local, national, or international concern and its importance to you.
Indicate a person who has had a significant influence on you, and describe that influence.
Describe a character in fiction, a historical figure, or a creative work (as in art, music, science, etc.) that has had an influence on you, and explain that influence.
A range of academic interests, personal perspectives, and life experiences adds much to the educational mix. Given your personal background, describe an experience that illustrates what you would bring to the diversity in a college community, or an encounter that demonstrated the importance of diversity to you.
Topic of your choice.

Stay posted for advice on writing and revising your essays. I have attended three workshops on writing the college application essay and will be sure to fill you all in! I'll also be reviewing the book 50 Successful Harvard Application Essays, Third Edition: What Worked for Them Can Help You Get into the College of Your Choice (Harvard Crimson). For now, here is a great exercise to get started.

The Ideas Exercise - Facing a blank Word document with a blinking cursor taunting you? Don't know what to write about in your essays? This exercise is designed to get your mind loosened up to writing freely. It should preferably be performed with paper and pen, but it can also be done on a computer word processor. Set aside ten minutes of time at a desk in a quiet area with no distractions, and simply begin writing. Here's the only rule: never, never stop writing. Even if you run out of things to write (or type) about, simply write "I have nothing to write about. I have nothing to write about." Before long, you will notice that you "have something to write about... this one time..." and so the exercise goes. Simply getting those ideas out on paper shows you after a few brainstorming sessions, which things you naturally think about in the world. Do you write mostly about your past experiences, about other people, about places in your future, or about the meaning of life? That's the gist to capture in your essay first and foremost: your approach to the world and the way you really think. (Exercise courtesy of a writing workshop I attended at Harvard.)

In addition, here's a great resource on the application process in general that also addresses the common apps and shows a few strong sample essays for you to get an idea of what is expected: Allen Grove's article on the Common Application (About.com - college apps).

Dartmouth College

Hanover, NH
July 24, 2010

After my second trip to Dartmouth and a good deal of research, one would think I would have a decisive opinion on this small research university located in Hanover, New Hampshire. A two hour bus ride brought me from Harvard through progressively more rural and beautiful landscape, until we arrived in Hanover. The small town located on one side of Dartmouth’s campus really meshes with the college, providing loads of accessible eateries and coffee shops in addition to a CVS, Gap, and a movie theater. The campus itself has an amazing New England feel with stately, uniform brick buildings and a huge “campus green” that provides a central open space for ultimate frisbee and other student activities throughout the year right in the heart of campus.

Dartmouth’s main draw is the amazing academic experience it is able to offer as a small liberal arts university. Dartmouth’s campus holds only around 4,200 undergraduates and  an 1,800 graduate students in medicine, engineering, and business, but that doesn’t stop it from accomplishing great research. Dartmouth is often regarded as providing the experience of a small liberal arts college, simply on a larger scale. The college prides itself on all of its courses being taught by full professors (matched only by Brown among Ivy League competitors) and having no teaching assistants, thus providing students with arguably the most intimate teaching environment of any Ivy League school (along with Brown). In fact, the teaching at Dartmouth is so good that the college was ranked number 1 among national universities for “Best Undergraduate Teaching” by U.S. News & World Report.

The idea of such an “intimate” academic environment stems mostly from the absence of graduate students in most departments. The idea is (like at most small liberal arts colleges) that without grad students around, there’s nothing to detract from the undergrad experience, and professors can both invest more time and effort into teaching undergrads and call only upon undergraduates to help them with research, since there are no graduate students to hog research positions. It could thus be said that Dartmouth’s defining attribute is the availability of opportunities for students of all ages (no upperclassmen advantage) and intensities (no preference for majors over non-majors).

Dartmouth also maintains a unique academic calendar colloquially known as the D-plan. The college runs on the quarter system, meaning that there’s a fall, winter, spring, and summer quarter as opposed to the a typical fall and spring semester. In order to graduate, students must take only three out of the four quarters each academic year, that ushers in a lot of flexibility that students have come to love. During the Freshman and Senior years, students are required to be in residence the whole academic year, so as to secure a proper introduction and conclusion to their academic experience. During Sophomore and Junior years, however, students may spend any term on campus, on leave, on a FSP (foreign study program), or on an LSA (language study abroad). This sort of freedom allows students to customize their academic experience and get great placement into internships in say the winter, when their competition (other university students) is tied up in the semester schedule. Another great example of availability is the required “sophomore summer” on campus, where sophomores rule the school with most upperclassmen gone and get top academic priority among professors and also get to try out leadership roles in campus organizations that would be taken up by upperclassmen.

Here's the broad outline for scheduling. Any term marked "R" means in-Residence on campus. As you can see, Sophomore and Junior years are where the real freedom lies:

Here's a sample schedule for a typical student:

All of this furthers the idea that the school is all about facilitating any experience for each and every student as best they can. This ultimately means awesome resume building, many would argue, at the expense of a truly academic experience as offered at most other semester schools that spend more time in depth on academics and have higher academic expectations during the regular year with fewer distractions. Personally, I think the D-plan specifically speaks to the type of people who want an “in and out” experience in college that doesn’t offer the attachment and typical college environment that most students grow to love.

One Dartmouth student seriously critiques the D-plan in the Dartmouth newspaper article “D-plan Dilemma,” citing that the alleged D-plan perks of more available internships and study abroad programs first of all aren’t all they’re cracked up to be since most such programs aren’t flexible enough to accommodate the D-plan. Secondly, the D-plan destroys clubs and relationships, since friends and couples can go a whole academic year without seeing each-other due to a frenzy of FSP and LSA programs, coupled with the risk that many students don’t get their first choice program and have to settle with what’s available. Student organizations can also go consecutive quarters without having the whole group together to make important decisions or to run events. The author also comments that though this jumble increases diversity of activities and opens up leadership roles to more students, the ultimate effect is to stifle group capability, especially for demanding groups like student publications, sports teams, or arts and music groups. Maybe the semester system doesn’t sound so bad after all!

Everything I’ve mentioned so far had a pretty neutral effect on me, but what really turned me off from the school was the overwhelming presence of Greek life on campus, a system in which over 60% of students participate. Dartmouth was, after all the inspiration for the movie “Animal House” which notoriously depicted the ravages college students and alcohol are capable of causing. Greek houses are everywhere, though it should be noted that they are all non-residential Greek houses, so they don’t carry the exclusivity often associated with such groups. Because the houses are small, they are merely social spaces for students to gather and eat, not to sleep, so all students still live in common university housing. My tour group was hazed repeatedly by shirtless frat guys and loud music blaring from frat houses, even right across from the school’s amazing library. To me, the Greek scene was just too dominant to be an appropriate part of social life, and it appeared to strongly detract from the academic experience rather than enriching campus culture overall.

Ultimately, this beautiful college in Hanover, New Hampshire provides an amazing undergraduate education with a very unique D-plan academic calendar and awesome student-professor interaction. However, it’s social scene and general student demographic may not appeal to everyone, and this school should be thought of as occupying a very particular niche among the nation’s top colleges.