14 thoughts on “Your Moment of Pain on this Good Friday”

  1. The Baptists are swarming this weekend. I just saw a huge cavalcade of church vans. One or two of them had scrawled in the back windows: Honk if you love Jesus. Txt and drive if U want to C Him Now.

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  3. She’s wait listed. I think this is supposed to be the “additional info” that influences wait list decisions. Bad choice. Really, they want to know that you’ve been cast in the hobbit or received a recording contract, or won a Grammy.
    Why do people fixation Harvard this way?

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  4. I once went to a Harvard informational meeting when I was in high school. The Harvard representative was talking about not being too original in one’s application. As an example of a “don’t”, he mentioned a student who, instead of writing out the Harvard application, created a fake newspaper where all of the stories were about his accomplishments. That was back in the early 90s, so you can imagine how much work that was.

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  5. On the other hand, I know someone who got accepted to Brown by drawing a comic strip instead of an essay (against the advice of his parents and guidance counselor).

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  7. Yes, it does fit. I kind of like the comic strip idea, probably because I hate what I’ve heard about college admissions questions, which seem to invite the applicant to crib heartrending and trendy situations from the Young Adult section of the library. Of course, you could still do the comic strip in a way that would annoy me.
    I’m still shaking my head over a story I read about an admissions officer going bonkers wanting to admit a young woman who wrote an anti-Twilight essay. Maybe it was amazingly sophisticated, maybe it wasn’t. In these internet days, you do have to think about the applicant sitting around thinking, what will go down with these people, and then scouring the internet for suitable opinions.

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  8. I was just realizing how well certain movies would work for admissions essays. Take, for instance Beyond Silence (1996), a German movie about the musically gifted daughter of deaf parents and her struggles to persuade her father that her music is worthwhile. Tweak that here and there and you’ve got a three hanky admissions essay. Just watch out that your family’s internet presence doesn’t contradict your tale of grit, struggle, the roots and wings our parents give us, and beating the odds.

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  11. I couldn’t bear watching it before, and still can’t. But I watched a little bit more. Ugh. It’s not satirical. It’s not funny. And, Harvard already knows that they “mean the world to . . . .” I’m not a musical expert, but the music/voice doesn’t strike me either.
    I think the problem with doing something unusual is that you still have to be really really good. You have to succeed at what you’re trying to do. If you pick an essay, a standard one, you have rules, and you try to do what you do better than others (who are entering the same competition). It’s like a race, where the goal is to get to the finish line first (though an essay isn’t quite so constrained).
    If you try to do something different, like a song, or a cartoon, or a newspaper, you still have to succeed in making something extraordinary. And, it’s harder to know what that will be, since he rules are so much more unconstrained.
    A girl in our neck of the woods spent her senior year pretending to be pregnant for her senior project. She told a few (parents, boyfriend, principal) but hid the truth from many others. Risky, different, and, potentially successful (though not at getting into Harvard that year).
    It’s kind of like baby names. There are a million college students, who are all trying to stand out, but end up standing out in the same way.
    (PS: her song might have worked, if it were an ode to Cornell. Harvard, though, I can only hope that it didn’t hurt her chances.)

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  12. “I’m still shaking my head over a story I read about an admissions officer going bonkers wanting to admit a young woman who wrote an anti-Twilight essay.”
    NPR had a story about the “chicken mcnugget” essay at Amherst that had everyone buzzing.
    I think the biggest failure is that everyone is trying to figure out what “they” want, but you can’t. I also think that the essays are looking for an authentic voice, and that authenticity doesn’t have to mean telling the story of your traumas (especially if you didn’t have any). I also hear that these days more of the college essays allow you to chose your own topic (though there, you have to make sure that you don’t write something that has them worrying about plagiarism).

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  13. “I think the biggest failure is that everyone is trying to figure out what “they” want, but you can’t. I also think that the essays are looking for an authentic voice, and that authenticity doesn’t have to mean telling the story of your traumas (especially if you didn’t have any).”
    That reminds me of something my husband’s grad school mentor told him. It was something like, “Sincerity is everything. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” (I googled that–it’s a George Burns quote.) Likewise with authenticity. Personally, I think there is no rabbit hole deeper than the endless search for authenticity.

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