We work our whole high school careers and even more so to accomplish only a few things. These accomplishments include: learning how to learn, creating social skills, and preparing for college. That's four years of education centered around two or three things.
The college admissions game is one that must be played for a long time. With very precise calculations that must be made years in advance. One must plan ahead to give themselves the best chance possible. Students spend hours upon hours slaving over coursework and devoting themselves to their passions. That's a lot of time, with a lot of personalities and stories that come from it.
College admission, however, expects a condensing of the past four years, they expect a condensing of yourself. A condensing of who you are, what you like, what motivates you, why you believe what you believe. Students are tasked with an enormous obstacle and provided only 650 words. So far I have already written 187 words.
Essays are only "one piece of the puzzle" as colleges like to say, but one must be compelling none the less. Those without an essay that sums up who they are as a person will be at a great disadvantage.
The challenge comes in using every word precisely. I think this is a worthwhile challenge as it weeds out those who not only can't articulate themselves properly, but those of whom are not motivated enough to take the time to do so.
2 comments:
I am so glad that you brought up the college admission process, and especially the essay portion, because it is a shared struggle that our whole class is going through right now. You also bring up a good point how it is ridiculous how we are expected to condense four years of our lives into one application, and are expected this to be enough to translate who we are as a person to an admissions department. What I have been having a hard time with is writing an essay that gives somewhat of an impression of who I am in only 650 words. My essay was originally much longer than the maximum word count, and I've had to cut down talking about what I am passionate about. So it raises the question of if these tactics of evaluating students college admissions has set up now is the best it can be. At the same time, though, the amount of work time and stress the application already costs seniors students is high enough and putting more requirements in the common application would only increase it; and, college admission officers already are burdened with hundreds of applications to read through, so they need something short and concise. It is a game of pros and cons, and in the end, maybe it is testing us to see how concise and straight to point we can be.
I agree with both of you saying that the college admissions material is all about being concise and straight to the point which is a necessity for the admissions departments to fairly evaluate every applicant. I think that the college application process can prepare us well for our next four years specifically in time management. Every college has explicit deadlines and requirements but each school is different so it is our responsibility to keep up with everything. Since many students today apply to 20+ schools, those that are disorganized in their application strategy will ultimately not be able to advertise themselves as strongly as a student that can handle the college workload and juggle various deadlines in a wide variety of classes.
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