Journal

College Application Essay (Practice Round)
Instructions: This personal statement helps us become acquainted with you in ways different from courses, grades, test scores, and other objective data. It will demonstrate your ability to organize your thoughts and express yourself. We are looking for an essay that will help us know you better as a person and as a student. Please write an essay (250 -700 words) on one of the options listed below.

* Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.
* Indicate a person who has had a significant influence on you, and describe that influence.
* Describe a character in fiction, a historical figure, or a creative work (as in art, music, science, etc.) that has had an influence on you, and explain that influence.
* A range of academic interests, personal perspectives, and life experiences adds much to the educational mix. Given your personal background, describe an experience that illustrates what you would bring to the diversity in a college community, or an encounter that demonstrated the importance of diversity to you.
* Chicago professor W. J. T. Mitchell entitled his 2005 book What Do Pictures Want? Describe a picture and explore what it wants.
* The University of Chicago has a venerable tradition of seminar-based learning, in which students and professors gather around the classroom table to discuss ideas. Less venerable, but no less valuable, is our tradition of conversation around another table–the dinner table. Indeed, on any given night you will fi nd members of our student community breaking bread together, discussing everything from The Symposium to The Simpsons. We in the admissions office would argue that a community can be defined by its table—byits shape, by who fi nds a seat there, by what transpires there, by what is inspired there. Tell us about your table.
* In Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths, he writes a parable entitled “Borges y yo,” which translates as “Borges and I.” In it, Borges writes about “the other one,” his counterpart, who shares his preference for “hourglasses, maps, eighteenth century typography, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Stevenson,” but is not the same as he. “The other one” is the famous author; “the other one” is the one “things happen to.” He concludes this parable with the line “I do not know which of us has written this page.” Write a page. Who has written it?
* What is your favorite noun? What does it mean to you?
* If you could invent anything, what would you create? Discuss.
* If you could affect the outcome of human history by changing a particular event, what event would you choose? How would you change it, and why?
* If you could spend an evening with any prominent person -- living, deceased, or fictional -- whom would you choose, and why?

PS: Don’t forget your new writing tools (varying sentence lengths) and cool new sentence starts (prepositional phrases, gerunds, compound adjectives, infinitive phrases)

Helpful Website: Do’s and Don’t of College Application Essays

http://www.hartlandhighschool.us/teachers/czapski/CollegeApplicationEssayAssignment.htm