When you apply to college, as we all know, you have to write an admissions essay. This is the college admissions officers way of trying to find something about you. To an extent, the words we choose to put down tell something about us. We each have our own "voice"; no two people write the same way. We all have different writing influences, teachers, books, newspapers, that have shaped the way we can use words. What we choose to say also says something about our values and who we are. But how much does it say? How much can you really learn about someone from a string of words a page long? For the purpose of college admissions when you can't meet everyone, an essay may work well. But in general, how much do you learn from the words one uses? Even a pen pal, who you may write for years but never see. How well do you know them?
~Becca LaRosa
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This is really random and unimportant but I was just curious. The time it says I posted at is 3 hours off. It was actually 9:42. Is there a reason?
ReplyDelete~Becca LaRosa
I learned about frame of reference today in Contemp. A person's frame of reference is what you said: morals, upbringing, values, practices, ideas, ways of thinking. I think that essays aren't the greatest way to learn about a person's frame of reference. Similarly, the SAT isn't the greatest way to figure out how apt a person truly is. But there needs to be some standardization somewhere or else the admissions people will be completely disorganized. However, the admissions essays aren't completely useless. Some of the topic questions, I've learned from my brother, are so open-ended that a student does have the opportunity to write about anything that interests him, and from the paper the colleges can figure out what is a priority in that student's life and what isn't. My brother wrote one on culture (what can you bring into a multicultural environment?) and another on a book he read (pick a quote from your favorite book and describe its significance). Essays are just one step into the college admissions process, the interviews probably tell a lot more.
ReplyDeleteI believe the simple answer to how much can you learn about a person from a college admission essay is that it is true that you don't learn much, but you learn just as much as the person from the college who is reading the essay cares. The fact that you didn't put every single aspect of your personality into the essay isn't going to make a difference in whether you are accepted to the college or not. It is the writer's responsibility to put the favorable aspects into the essay that he or she believes with help with being accepted into that college.
ReplyDeleteYou also brought up pen pals. I have gone to Virginia every summer for the past 4 years, and I have many friends who live there. I primarily talk to them on the phone or through the internet, and have only seen some of them in person 4 or 5 times for two weeks at a time, but I know them better than I know some of my friends here. So, I think the issue of how well you know a pen pal is different from how well college admissions officers know you through a single essay.
-Audrey Kindsfather
It bothers me that the time is off too.
ReplyDeleteI agree with what Audrey said about pen pals. My best friend lives in Ohio and we always talk on the phone or text or write to each other on the computer. I tell her things that I don't tell anyone else and that I sometimes don't even admit to myself until that moment. When writing to friends, or even in a diary we often seem more willing to confide and say things we could never imagine saying face to face.
-Alexa Kaczmarski
I know what you mean (Alexa and Audrey). But I think that having a pen pal is a way to invent yourself or make yourself into somebody entirely different. With you guys, you have seen your friends occasionally. But with people you've never met over the internet or talked with them through other forms of non-face-to-face communication, anyone can lie like crazy and never fear about getting caught in their lies. That's how we hear those scary stories about pedophiles or creeps on the internet.
ReplyDelete-- tori lee
I think that communicating via distance (internet, phone, letters, whatever) is certainly an effective means of communication. Also, there's no doubt that people will say things that they would never dare to say face-to-face. However, there are tons of flaws in online communication. Not knowing who one is talking to is probably the biggest hurdle. Furthermore, few relationships can survive when people have never met face to face. This is probably why so many E-harmony set up relationships fail. Also, as Tori mentioned, one never knows who on the internet is a creep or pedophile.
ReplyDelete-Bryce Cody