The following entry is an edited version of my response to the following question posted on Quora.com
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Is this essay strategy too risky for essays that ask what you like most about yourself?
I've gotten into all of my activities by just searching around in whatever subjects I'm interested in (various competitions, informal computer science projects), and I most definitely wouldn't have given them up even if they didn't count for college admissions or have any formal credentials attached to them. I am proud of not simply doing what others do (or did) because it looks good or it's how others were successful.
Is this an acceptable attitude to espouse in essays that ask what you are most proud of, such as the prompts from the UCs, Stanford, MIT? My hunch says it is; it's important to me and very personal. My main concerns are that the topic itself might look too commonplace at first glance, or look arrogant by disparaging the idea of not doing activities for awards/honors.
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The advice given by Shakespeare’s character Polonius: “to thine own self be true” often appears as the standard answer to your question. You can find some form of it on many of the admission office blogs and private counseling websites.
In Hamlet, however, Polonius’ advice is held up to ridicule by Hamlet; this often gets missed when people look for one-liners to help students. On the other hand, Hamlet, a student too, had his own troubles. If I was going to wax philosophical I’d say the play centers on whether there exists a self that could ever be (or not to be?) ‘true’, but that would lead away from your question.
Here’s what I say when people ask about essay topics: any topic can change the way we look at a student, sometimes for good or sometimes for ill. It depends on two things, one of which you have control over and the other, well, the other you do not, unless you do some detective work.
But before I get to the poles, let’s settle in to the great middle. The vast majority of admission essays are pretty standard stuff. In other words, they rehearse many of the same words, activities and hopes and dreams as many others. This should come as no surprise. Those students going for selective schools have largely done similar things: taken tough courses, earned good grades done well on standardized tests and joined stuff, Much of the stuff is fairly standard too, from sports to community service to research to internships etc. The list is not as long as you might think as students often take part in activities in part because of interest and in part because they’ve heard certain activities look good on applications. The activities themselves follow a bell curve, with some being exceptional and with some being pretty lame. But most fall into a large middle and that is not where you want to be when you are trying to get into highly selective schools. You need to be at the far good end for most of the factors that schools use to determine who gets in.
With essays it’s the same thing. There is little that you can say about your recognition in activities that will make what you sound exceptional in terms of standing out among the far end of the bell curve. Those who do have such things have an immense advantage. These activities could range from special talents in athletics, or arts, or it could be a sad tale of woe that demonstrates grit, or service work that makes substantive change in a community or country or research that’s been published in national journals. (One example from a student I talked to this week: She carried the Olympic torch. Carrying the torch got her in to a great school and this was the majority of the discussion for her subsequent job interviews too. It’s hard, in other words, to compete against people like this with activities.) . In applicant pools of 30,000 or more a small percentage of the students really have already accomplished things most of us will never do in a lifetime. The number is not large, but the numbers do add up.
So if you haven’t created a start up that Gates is funding or haven’t climbed 8 of the worlds 10 top peaks are you doomed? No: what you have are words. If you write a great essay on something small, that actually will help you more than trying to make something pretty good sound better than it is given the competition you are up against. In other words, trying to make an essay about making a free throw in a district tournament sound like an NBA final in terms of importance would not work. But writing about practice or learning to shoot free throws in icy cold against a broken down backboard just might convey something about you more important than your winning shot. Details, active verbs, flowing sentences and all the typical things people say makes great writing are what often stands out. Form is more important than content unless you have done something remarkable. But here’s the great thing about words. You can make driving fast in a car an incredible essay. Don’t believe me? Read this one.
So you need to write well. Your words are things you can control and work on.
What you can’t control is who is the individual reading your words. Each of us has things we like in life that others don’t. Your essay on activities that don’t match the typical list will likely appeal to the mavericks reading essays. On the other hand, a well-rounded type who likes student leaders and people who will get involved in similar activities on campus may respond differently. It is not that one reader is better than another (although there certainly are good and bad readers too); instead, it is in part how the reader has grown up and come to value what they think is important for the good of the school they are working for. This too varies, but most of the good things tend to fall in a bell curve too.
When I wrote a how to on college essays for US News, I had no idea that it would, many years later, still be used by some schools around the world. I happened to say some things that teachers and parents and students responded to. I ended that essay with the advice: take a risk. I still believe this, but now I qualify it.
There are some topics that will doom you. I have written about this recently on Quora but here’s the sound bite. Most folks reading applications are young and tend to sit on the more left hand side of the bell curve of politics. What this means is that those of a very conservative bent face an audience that may not be sympathetic and can at times, be downright hostile. Of course they can’t say this in public and maybe they are not even aware that when reading they tend to be more sympathetic to those who fit in the worldview they hold when it comes to core beliefs.
To sum up, it sounds like your topic could be great if you write well. Final advice: read your essay out loud to your best friend. If he or she says, yes, that sounds like you, then you should be happy. It’s your voice. This does not mean you may get accepted to any of the schools you are applying to. But if you felt you had to change your voice in order to be accepted to the school, then is that school really the best place for you to be?
But I would be disingenuous if I said the decision in front of you is simple. The people who read applications now are not often a part of the teaching faculty. What you say in your essay might have been great for a prof who teaches and who does research. Typically this is someone who pursued an academic passion early on and then went on to become a prof. If you have pursued academic passions over typical activities then you would likely find a sympathetic ear with a prof. On the other hand, it might happen that not being actively involved in the usual suspect activities might not spark the admission officer’s same sympathies. . There is an increasing disconnect between faculty and administration at schools and the admission office is just one example. I know of cases of some great students who have done exceptional things in their academic pursuits who have not been accepted at some places because they were deemed too narrowly focused (the well-rounded student meme is not as popular as it once was in the descriptions of what selective schools look for, but it still exists in some admission offices or at least in some admissions officers minds as a useful template for evaluating students).
If you want to be a Machiavellian Prince make sure to Google the staff who reads applications at the school. Most schools read regionally now. You can find quite a bit about people doing the reading and this might help you decide, especially when thinking along political/religious lines, whether a particular topic might impress a particular reader. But beyond even this, if the person reading your application has gone to the school, then there are likely breadcrumbs to follow about what they did when they were there. If he or she did some things that mirror your interests this is likely a good thing. If this sounds too calculated I would point out that there are reports now about how schools investigate students’ Facebook pages, tweets etc. It should, perhaps, then be considered a form of flattery if students do the same to the admission staff. Some might argue that this form of turnaround is not fair play, but the discussion about whether selective admission or life is fair is the subject for a much longer discussion on a subsequent entry.
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