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'.
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'.
