Application Help from GuruFi

I applied to colleges last year, and this means that I know just how painful it can be to craft the “why do you want to go to College X” essays.

In retrospect, I can think of two things I wish I had heard when I started writing these essays.  I write them down now in hopes that they will make some overwhelmed high school senior’s life a little easier as January 1^st approaches.

1.  What’s the point.

When I began writing these essays, I remember being unduly frustrated by the extent to which I felt as though I was simply doing busywork.  I initially approached these essays by researching college websites, and then by trying to incorporate the most interesting details from these sites into an essay.

This was the wrong approach.

What I came to realize was that the whole point of these essays is to identify some aspect of yourself that meshes well with the school you are applying to.  This is an activity that is far from busywork, because it forces you to identify where your interests lie, and forces you to consider what exactly you want out of a college.

What’s more is that if you find that there is not much overlap between a particular schools approach to learning and your own values, then it’s a pretty good indicator that you might be happier applying elsewhere.

2.  How to write it.

As I was writing these essays I came upon a simple structure that I thought was fairly effective.

i. Spend the first half talking about yourself and your academic passions.

In this you can talk about what you want to study in college or what activities or issues you are particularly interested in.  This gives you one more outlet to re-enforce some aspect of yourself in the application.  This is also a good place to show the school that your interests lie in line with their mission statement.  For example, if the school has an emphasis on interdisciplinary thinking, then it might be good idea to emphasize how multifaceted your interests are.

ii. Do your research to find how the university could help you in fulfilling your passions.

The most important thing to do in this section is to be specific.  For example, if you see yourself as potentially interested in medicine, don’t just talk about how prestigious the biology program is, there are plenty of universities with great biology programs.  Instead you may want to talk about a student research club that does great things on campus, or about a program that connects the university with a local hospital.  You may also want to talk about things that you could see yourself interested in that are not related to a potential career path, but that are more or less unique to the school.

One benefit of using this structure is that most of the schools you are applying to likely have something in common (otherwise you probably wouldn’t be applying).  This means that the first half of this essay can be essentially recycled from school to school without making you sound apathetic.

To demonstrate my point, I have included how I answered this question for Cornell last year (I was accepted).

According to my mom, when I was eight I confidently proclaimed, “I’m not going to have a boring job like yours. My job will be interesting, and I’ll have a new and different problem to work on every day”.

Now I’m seventeen, and in the past nine years I have seen a much more of the world. Through this experience, I have learned that if a problem is interesting and unsolved, it’s unlikely that I will be able to fully grasp even its difficulty in a day. More than a year ago, I began working on a problem in graph theory. It posed an interesting and extremely elegant question, and I had a summer month full of free time to work on it. Empty notebook in hand, I began playing around, drawing graphs, trying to understand the problem. Often, through the course of this work I ran into tangential questions that I felt were worth exploring. To answer these other questions, I was forced to research parts of math that were very much not graph theory. Found myself learning theoretical computer science one day, and order theory the next. Yet slowly, through my questions, I began to glean a deeper understanding of just what made the problem so tricky. Now, more than a year later, I have produced significant results that seem likely to lead to a solution of the original problem. But even if it is declared solved, I will not be done. Many of the most interesting questions that I explored during the course of my research remain unanswered. And with so many interesting problems to pursue, I would be letting down my eight-year-old self if I abandoned them.

I believe that the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell, with its attitude of learning for learning’s sake, would be the perfect place for me to continue this research as well as to begin working on other interesting problems. I know this because, whether it’s pioneering American literature and history at a university level, having the most comprehensive Asian studies programs in the nation, or leading the field of biochemistry by hybridizing departments, the College of Arts and Sciences has a been working on interesting, cutting edge problems for a very long time. And in this passionate environment, I know that I will be able to meet my eight-year-old ambitions. I will be able to work to explore the unknown.

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