Tell Us About Yourself

Common Essay Questions

Tell us about yourself Don’t write an autobiography, focus on your personality, insight and commitment. Use vivid specific examples and anecdotes that paint you as an interesting person, not just an applicant with a transcript and SAT score. .

Why did you choose this college? Don’t ingratiate and don’t be arrogant. Make sure you have your facts straight about the school and demonstrate the due diligence you put in when choosing this school. Use specifics, (names of professors, courses, special programs, facilities).

Sample Questions

Common App Personal Essay Please write an essay (250 words minimum) on a topic of your choice or on one of the options listed below. 1 Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you. 2 Discuss some issue of personal, local, national, or international concern and its importance to you. 3 Indicate a person who has had a significant influence on you, and describe that influence. 4 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. 5 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.

UCONN • Please describe what makes you a unique individual and how these qualities can benefit the University of Connecticut community. • Describe a person or event that has had a profound effect upon your life. • Ask and answer the one question you wish we had asked.

Yale In addition to the Common app essay and an additional topic of your choice….

Please respond in 25 words or fewer to each of the questions below, using the space available after each question. 1. What would you do with a free afternoon? 2. Name one thing of which you are especially proud. 3. What two qualities do you admire most in other people? 4. What do you wish you were better at being or doing? 5. What makes you feel physically and mentally renewed, other than a good night’s rest?

Penn You have just completed your 300-page autobiography. Please submit page 217.

Harvey Mudd In a world where technology continually adapts and progresses, Harvey Mudd College expects that our students will be aware of the impact of their work on society. How would you use new advances to improve your life and/or the lives of those around you? Describe your idea and its potential impact. Feel free to be as creative or as practical as you like. NYU Describe a trait or characteristic that has been passed along to you by your family. Tell us why you like or dislike this aspect of yourself.

New York City is an essential element of academic and cultural life at NYU. If you could engage in an activity or start a club or service organization at NYU, what would it be and how would you envision it impacting the larger community?

You have been selected to sing in a talent show. What song would you choose? Why?

University of Chicago

1. "At present you need to live the question."—Rainer Maria Rilke, translated from the German by Joan M. Burnham.

2. The short film Powers of Ten begins with an aerial shot of a couple picnicking in a Chicago park. The camera zooms out ten meters. It then zooms out again, but the degree of the zoom has increased by a power of ten; the camera is now 100 meters away. It continues to 1,000 meters, then 10,000, and so on, traveling through the solar system, the galaxy, and eventually to the edge of the known universe. Here the camera rests, allowing us to examine the vast nothingness of the universe, black void punctuated sparsely by galaxies so far away they appear as small stars. The narrator comments, "This emptiness is normal. The richness of our own neighborhood is the exception." Then the camera reverses its journey, zooming in to the picnic, and—in negative powers of ten—to the man’s hand, the cells in his hand, the molecules of DNA within, their atoms, and then the nucleus both "so massive and so small" in the "vast inner space" of the atom. Zoom in and out on a person, place, event, or subject of interest. What becomes clear from far away that you can’t see up close? What intricate structures appear when you move closer? How is the big view related to the small, the emptiness to the richness?

3.Chicago author Nelson Algren said, "A writer does well if in his whole life he can tell the story of one street." Chicagoans, but not just Chicagoans, have always found something instructive, and pleasing, and profound in the stories of their block, of Main Street, of Highway 61, of a farm lane, of the Celestial Highway. Tell us the story of a street, path, road—real or imagined or metaphorical.

4.Argonne National Laboratory and Fermilab (both national laboratories managed by the University of Chicago) have particle accelerators that smash bits of atoms together at very high energies, allowing particles to emerge that are otherwise not part of the everyday world. These odd beasts—Z bosons, pi mesons, strange quarks—populated the universe seconds after the Big Bang, and allow their observers to glimpse the fabric of the universe. Put two or three ideas or items in a particle accelerator thought experiment. Smash 'em up. What emerges? Let us glimpse the secrets of the universe newly revealed.