HELP PLEASE! Please be harsh. I am EAing so I really need a strong, coherent essay.
On commonapp it doesn't really give a word count for this essay. Mine is less than a page long (Times new roman, 12pt).
How does the University of Chicago, as you know it now, satisfy your desire for a particular kind of learning, community, and future? Please address with some specificity your own wishes and how they relate to UChicago.
I remember the first time I read Against Interpretation. It was 2 o'clock in the morning. I was sitting in my bed, and as I reached the finishing lines of the magnificently written polemic, I jumped out of bed and punched in the air out of sheer delight and excitement. I realized at that moment what I wanted to do with my life - I wanted to become a critic.
What I soon realized was that to become a critic, I needed to know about everything. A critic is someone who sees things on the whole continuum, who sees the bigger picture. When other people dismissed B films as cheap exploitation, Sontag saw them as a metaphor for the decline and ambiguity in artistic morality. In order to sculpt myself into the critic I know I have the potential to become, what I need, above all, is a UChicago education. An education that lets 'knowledge grow from more to more'. At UChicago, I will be able to explore my areas of interest in greater depth, but more importantly, I have boundless intellectual freedom to explore things I knew little, or never even heard, about. With a general education that branches out into six different areas of knowledge, UChicago ensures that my mind will be stretched to its widest possible dimensions, which is the fundamental foundation to becoming a critic.
More importantly, UChicago is somewhere I belong. I have always been an oddball, someone who does not really fit in traditional molds. As a third culture kid, I have never been 'nice' enough to be Canadian, but not reserved enough to be traditionally Chinese either. People often see me as a bookworm, and rightly so, but my inability to talk without pop culture references also confuse them - 'if you watch so many movies, how do you have time to read?' Perhaps this was the reason that I decided to write my Extended Essay for the International Baccalaureate on how Thomas Pynchon subverts expectations in The Crying of Lot 49. I only believe in expectations to the extent that they should be destroyed, something that echoes with UChicago's own ethos to 'challenge accepted ideas.' Yes, I have always been eccentric, which is the reason that I know for sure that I will take to UChicago like fish to water. At UChicago, there is no 'correct' way to do something, only endless ideas on how something could be done. With its strong emphasis on Socratic method and 'disdain for dogma and conventionality', UChicago is the only place I can imagine myself studying at. Only at UChicago, will my critical thinking skills be sharpened to their finest.
It is always hard to describe the best minds of their generations. When people speak of Da Vinci, the list goes on: painter, architect, historian, botanist... Years later, when people speak of Cecily Chen, I wish for myself the same: critic, postmodernist, philosopher, writer, UChicago graduate.
(488)
THANK YOU SO MUCH
On commonapp it doesn't really give a word count for this essay. Mine is less than a page long (Times new roman, 12pt).
How does the University of Chicago, as you know it now, satisfy your desire for a particular kind of learning, community, and future? Please address with some specificity your own wishes and how they relate to UChicago.
I remember the first time I read Against Interpretation. It was 2 o'clock in the morning. I was sitting in my bed, and as I reached the finishing lines of the magnificently written polemic, I jumped out of bed and punched in the air out of sheer delight and excitement. I realized at that moment what I wanted to do with my life - I wanted to become a critic.
What I soon realized was that to become a critic, I needed to know about everything. A critic is someone who sees things on the whole continuum, who sees the bigger picture. When other people dismissed B films as cheap exploitation, Sontag saw them as a metaphor for the decline and ambiguity in artistic morality. In order to sculpt myself into the critic I know I have the potential to become, what I need, above all, is a UChicago education. An education that lets 'knowledge grow from more to more'. At UChicago, I will be able to explore my areas of interest in greater depth, but more importantly, I have boundless intellectual freedom to explore things I knew little, or never even heard, about. With a general education that branches out into six different areas of knowledge, UChicago ensures that my mind will be stretched to its widest possible dimensions, which is the fundamental foundation to becoming a critic.
More importantly, UChicago is somewhere I belong. I have always been an oddball, someone who does not really fit in traditional molds. As a third culture kid, I have never been 'nice' enough to be Canadian, but not reserved enough to be traditionally Chinese either. People often see me as a bookworm, and rightly so, but my inability to talk without pop culture references also confuse them - 'if you watch so many movies, how do you have time to read?' Perhaps this was the reason that I decided to write my Extended Essay for the International Baccalaureate on how Thomas Pynchon subverts expectations in The Crying of Lot 49. I only believe in expectations to the extent that they should be destroyed, something that echoes with UChicago's own ethos to 'challenge accepted ideas.' Yes, I have always been eccentric, which is the reason that I know for sure that I will take to UChicago like fish to water. At UChicago, there is no 'correct' way to do something, only endless ideas on how something could be done. With its strong emphasis on Socratic method and 'disdain for dogma and conventionality', UChicago is the only place I can imagine myself studying at. Only at UChicago, will my critical thinking skills be sharpened to their finest.
It is always hard to describe the best minds of their generations. When people speak of Da Vinci, the list goes on: painter, architect, historian, botanist... Years later, when people speak of Cecily Chen, I wish for myself the same: critic, postmodernist, philosopher, writer, UChicago graduate.
(488)
THANK YOU SO MUCH
