Thank you very much for your advice, but...you seem to be affiliated with Stanford. Are you a student or a faculty member? If the latter, I’d feel a little...uncomfortable taking any more specific help from you. Even if it’s legal, it feels like cheating, and that kind of thing would eat at me.
Your idea to write multiple drafts is a good one; they’re really short essays after all.
On the plus side, I’m told that most people’s essays typically give very negative first impressions, as boasting about what they’ve done.
See, that’s what I really hate about this whole process. You’re expected to have incredibly good marketing skills, and trying really hard never to lie to yourself or doublespeak in any way, even if you don’t succeed, is going to make you worse at marketing. You have to get rid of useful, realistic humility by emphasizing only the things you think the admissions officers think makes you a well-rounded person—but at the same time you have to be subtle enough and modest enough to make them think you’re not bragging, even though they know perfectly well that the only reason you wrote this essay was to show them how cool you are.
Honestly, I’m probably just a little resentful that my talents don’t run in that direction—or I didn’t choose to develop them in that direction.
Edit: None of these new comments showed up as a little red envelope. I thought no one had looked at this yet until my karma increased slightly. Has that happened to any of you?
Thank you very much for your advice, but...you seem to be affiliated with Stanford. Are you a student or a faculty member? If the latter, I’d feel a little...uncomfortable taking any more specific help from you. Even if it’s legal, it feels like cheating, and that kind of thing would eat at me.
Your idea to write multiple drafts is a good one; they’re really short essays after all.
See, that’s what I really hate about this whole process. You’re expected to have incredibly good marketing skills, and trying really hard never to lie to yourself or doublespeak in any way, even if you don’t succeed, is going to make you worse at marketing. You have to get rid of useful, realistic humility by emphasizing only the things you think the admissions officers think makes you a well-rounded person—but at the same time you have to be subtle enough and modest enough to make them think you’re not bragging, even though they know perfectly well that the only reason you wrote this essay was to show them how cool you are.
Honestly, I’m probably just a little resentful that my talents don’t run in that direction—or I didn’t choose to develop them in that direction.
Edit: None of these new comments showed up as a little red envelope. I thought no one had looked at this yet until my karma increased slightly. Has that happened to any of you?
I’m a freshman at Stanford, not a faculty member.
I’m not entirely sure (I rarely make posts), but I believe that you only get the red envelope from replies to comments, not replies to posts.