Undergraduate / interspecies - university of chicago extended essay [2]

Hello everyone, thanks in advance for your help and feedback. I am planning to apply to UChicago this year and i have been wrestling for the past month with their infamous essay prompt. i went through of their past year prompt and one clicked and another one prompt for this year clicked as well. I tried asking my brother and sister for feedback which one i should pick and if there's any room for improvement but as you might have imagine i do not come from family with critiques and their feedback make me even more confuse. so i hope you guys can help me a bit more on my draft, on which essay i should pick and how i can improve it better. once again thank you.

Second Essay.

In an ideal world where inter-species telepathic communication exists, which species would you choose to have a conversation with, and what would you want to learn from them? Would you ask beavers for architectural advice? Octopuses about cognition? Pigeons about navigation? Ants about governance? Make your case-both for the species and the question.
Inspired by Yvan Sugira, Class of 2029

I used to beg to stay at Grandpa Wen's house. Around 8:45 p.m, once the tea had cooled just enough to sip without flinching, he'd lean in, eyes glinting and tell me, quite seriously, that he'd once been a Chinese spy sent to Singapore to keep tabs on the revolution. Curled into the arm of his cracked leather chair, mug warming my knees, I felt like I was traveling through time, witnessing the youth of Lee Kuan Yew, the Father of Nation. For my 5th birthday, Grandpa gifted me a dusty old encyclopedia with fold-out maps of Mesopotamia, Uruk, Lagash and Nippur.
That's how I became addicted to history. Because, that I truly am.
I am not just talking about the history that is recorded, the one everyone knows of and studies, but also the one that went unrecorded, the one we would have to imagine.
If you're a history fiend like me, you probably find yourself often drawn to fiction, wild, vivid imaginings. I'm quite convinced our imaginations are psychic portals into pasts we can't quite remember or futures we have yet to live.
So, if the Earth kept a diary, a literal record of everything it's been through, you would be the one to hold it.
You, deep-sea glass sponge.
You would have the answer to every question that we history fiends long to ask.
I would start our conversation with the time before us, Homo sapiens, with the history that inspires every medieval fantasy and legend.
"Did dragons truly exist?" I would ask you.
Then, the ocean's abyss was a lot closer to the surface than it is now. Surely you felt them! Their roars when they lashed out with fire-breath during territorial battles. The thunder of their landing that scattered birds and sent creatures burrowing deeper into the earth. Your great-great-great-great-great-grandfathers must have passed down stories of how each of their steps, over the years, etched legends into their silica bones.
"You are living it easy at 10,000 meters under, we had it harsher back then," he would probably tease you. "It was rough back then. Most of us did not live to see our 100th birthday. I lost half of my brothers to the great floods and tectonic shifts that tore both the ocean floor and sky apart," he would add dramatically.
I am sure that's one of the things we might have in common. How the ones before us always tell stories of how harsh their lives were compared to ours.
Your kind, phylum Porifera, is ancient. Six hundred million years old. That's before gods had names. Before humans scratched tablets to remember or be remembered.

If I could probe deeper into your thoughts, if you have any, I wonder if I would find stories of how your forebearers witnessed the dawn of consciousness; The first cry of the first ever modern human, evolving from Homo sapiens.
You would indeed have many stories pertaining to the unrecorded history we all yearn for, these frames of time that we so desperately try to grasp through our readings. Beyond that, I believe that you might have the answer to the question we all ponder.
"Are we alone out there?" "Do aliens exist?"
You can tell me. I know you've sworn secrecy, an oath of silence. After all, we humans tend to ruin things. But this is a safe space. I will myself swear to secrecy, too.
Let's humor, for a second, that aliens do exist and have been to Earth. It's a stretch, sure. But that's what imagination is there for. Remember the psychic portals, I am traveling one now.
If I were an alien, my first stop on Earth would be the ocean, the one thing that makes our planet glow differently in the galaxy. I'd want to know where all that water comes from. Unlike us, who know it's from magma vapor condensing and falling as rain, aliens might think the answer lies deep beneath the water, at the bottom. And I suspect you might have drawn a pattern or two of the aliens' backs and forth.
I would finish my conversation with you by asking you "Why 10,000 meters in the abyss of the ocean? What's the secret behind your longevity?"
You live where the pressure feels like a thousand elephants on a twig. Maybe that's the only way the Earth can keep its diary safe, intact, and unbiased; In a place where very few can reach.
Speaking to you would be like listening to our forefathers around a bonfire, reliving what was and we never knew; how we came to be who we are, as we are, and imagining what we will be. And somewhere in the background, I'd hear Grandpa Wen's laugh, soft and low, slipping through the steam of a chipped mug. I cannot fathom a more thrilling, captivating conversation than with you, Deep-sea glass sponge, nature's oldest archive, our oldest living 'elder'.

Undergraduate / Out-of-the-red - University of Chicago extended essay [2]

Hello everyone, thanks in advance for your help and feedback. I am planning to apply to UChicago this year and i have been wrestling for the past month with their infamous essay prompt. i went through of their past year prompt and one clicked and another one prompt for this year clicked as well. I tried asking my brother and sister for feedback which one i should pick and if there's any room for improvement but as you might have imagine i do not come from family with critiques and their feedback make me even more confuse. so i hope you guys can help me a bit more on my draft, on which essay i should pick and how i can improve it better. once again thank you.

the first essay.

We're all familiar with green-eyed envy or feeling blue, but what about being "caught purple-handed"? Or "tickled orange"? Give an old color-infused expression a new hue and tell us what it represents. - Inspired by Ramsey Bottorff, Class of 2026

Out-of-the-red.

With her brows drawn together in a sharp and severe line, her eyes wide and unblinking, Ms. Savana, my 5th-grade English teacher, shouted, "Why did you ask that out of the blue?".

Fear-struck, Jimmy, my classmate, recanted his question, and sat down drowning in shame, deeply believing that he had done something wrong. I never paid more attention to it than a fraction of a millisecond. But these small moments of anti-defiance, stripping down away the Jimmys that exist in all of us, have occurred more than I can count, enough to turn milliseconds of attention into an hour movie. The Jimmy's that yearn to venture outside of the norm. The Jimmy that wonders and questions. Yet, society would not dare let us do that. Society, or should I rather say the Ms. Savanas that always dreaded the blue, the depth of impossibility where lies boundless possibility would rather sternly drive us to the path of commonality. The path that serves their right. The path only they know of.

What do you picture when you see one hundred thousand people ferociously fighting over one spot? What is it that you first see? Is it the face of the weak getting walked over? Is it the stream of individuals mindlessly walking to their cemetery without realizing it? I see red. I see the red of the blood. The blood of their possibilities dying, suffocating under the crowd of thousands of people faithfully following the same scripts handed to them ever since birth, under the presumptuous of the likes of Ms. Savana boldly believing that they may define us, that they may know what's best for us while barricading us in this invisible cage called normal, safe net.
"The red or blue pill?" they often ask you. One has the ability to turn you back in time while the other gives a guaranteed five hundred thousand dollars; which one should you pick? But they often generously forget to disclose to you that if you choose to take the red pill, you will lose your sense of self, that you will have that certainty of five hundred thousand dollars while drowning in the red of your dreams, which is self. So, in essence, you are committing suicide. Is it worth it? I know. Pardon me for the morbid comparison, but if this grotesque depiction of what I believe is can provoke deeper thinking so we may focus on what could be, then I will gladly use my penmanship as a martyr.

I want to ask new questions to old problems. Or discover new problems by using old questions in the most unorthodox way, ways that will make the likes of Ms. Savana press their lips into a thin, bloodless line, barely containing the words that threaten to burst forth.
"New knowledge cannot be formed when hindered by old ways of thinking."

So yes, I dare not to fret at the impossibility of the blue. I yearn for out-of-the-blues. I will gladly take the adventurous route of the blue, of the unexpected, of the unknown over the red of certainty. I will gladly march forward on a journey without knowing the end while keeping my "self "rather than drowning in the Red Sea, where my "self" is void.

In a parallel world where the Jimmys inside of us is galvanized to shape thyself, where knowing and exploring thyself is the new gospel, we will have the Ms. Savanas sternly scolding anyone shying away from their true sense of discovery, shouting, "Why did you ask that out-of-the-red?"
So out with the red, or I shall rather say out-of-the-red.

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