Word: essayed
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Admissions officers love a good against-all-odds story. "We like to see that kids have overcome adversity," says Cornell's Gabard. "Goodness knows, they'll face adversity in college." Provided the adversity is authentic--like a death in the family--it can make a much more gripping essay topic than a summer jaunt through Europe. And if applicants have suffered any dip in academic performance, they need to account for it, either in an essay or in a counselor's letter...
With scattered Cs in the ninth and 10th grades and football and guitar as his only extracurriculars, Comeback Kid would normally have missed Bowdoin's first cut of applications. But in his essay he wrote of how he'd spent those first two years of high school "slowly poisoning myself in a pool of malted hops." Then a close relative who was an alcoholic died of a stroke. After that, Comeback Kid cut out the beer, got A-pluses in his senior year and won a national writing award. He also won a unanimous thumbs-up for admission...
...were initially not too impressed by a student with good test scores but whose grades were all over the map. Then a reader noticed that she came from a family with no higher education and worked up to 40 hours a week as a cashier. But it was her essay that really swayed the committee, as she described being derisively called "white girl" by some other blacks and related how a classmate told her that he "looked forward to seeing me 'flipping burgers' after graduation...
Before you go crafting your sob story, it bears noting that college admissions officers are among the world's finest b.s. detectors. A case in point: a student's Cornell essay about a relative's homosexuality struck an admissions reader as gratuitous: "This has got shock value written all over...
...resorted to some almost comical end-runs around the spirit of the law. The university used to award a yearly scholarship to a Mexican-American student; now it goes to a student who speaks Spanish really well. Admissions officers no longer know an applicant's race. But a new essay question asks about each student's "background" and "cultural traditions." When Rice officials read applications, they look for "diverse life experiences" and what they awkwardly call "overcome students," who have triumphed over hardship...