because I'm suddenly curious

[moominmolly]

[Poll #1121737]

Comments

[cutieperson]

you forgot "i am cos".
i had actually dropped out of high school when i first applied to college, so it would have been difficult to get it read by a teacher or anyone at school. as for not running it by others, well, i was just like that.

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

As much as I love the coses of the world, I'm curious about what sort of support people I know who took the traditional and unexamined path had.

as for not running it by others, well, i was just like that.

Heh. Yeah, point. I definitely should have put that in as an option. :)

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Yes, "I was just like that" is why I filled out the answers I did, even though I can't remember for sure :). Seemed likely.

[kcatalyst.livejournal.com]

For the essay bit, I am cos -- I can't for the life of me remember who read them. Probably my parents, if anyone.

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

Clearly there is a clamoring for cos!

[crouchback.livejournal.com]

My mom read mine over, then asked if she could type it for me..and altered one of my answers without telling me. I only found out about it later.

(They asked when you first heard of the University of Chicago. My truthful answer was that I heard of it in an episode of the Outer Limits (http://membres.lycos.fr/tmcr/daystar/tol_s1/tol_eps08.shtml).)

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

Ha! What did she change it to?

[pekmez.livejournal.com]

It was a while ago, but I can't imagine that my embarrassment at having someone else read what I wrote would have won out over my lack of self-confidence at whether it was a good college essay, so I suspect that my mom and an English teacher probably both read my essay and then told me what they didn't like about it and then I ignored them.

[metagnat.livejournal.com]

I was home-schooled for a year when I was seven, but I figure that doesn't really count for purposes of college essays.

-E

[metagnat.livejournal.com]

Oh, also, my mother proofed my essays, but she's a high school English teacher, so her input probably counts double, somehow.

-E

[dpolicar]

Lots of people read my college app, but only after I sent it in, so I decided not to count them for purposes of this poll. (My nerdish cousin, most notoriously, was scandalized by the informal tone of it.)

Private grade school, public high school.

[ratatosk.livejournal.com]

Yeah -- similar for me too -- if my family read my essays, it was out of curiosity and not to contribute anything. The more I think about it, though, the more I think that only my main Chicago essay was interesting enough for anyone to want to read.

[signsoflife.livejournal.com]

My college essay was pure BS, I wrote it while waiting for the FedEx pickup, and I would have been too embarrassed to have anyone read it. Letting people read my SOPs -- and getting those SOPs to the quality where I was proud of them -- is kind of an indicator of how I've matured (!) since high school.

[signsoflife.livejournal.com]

(and, yeah, I went to public schools through 9th grade, but I don't think that's relevant to my college application experience.)

[dbang.livejournal.com]

My mother (a writer and teacher) proofed (and commented upon, and helped me work out outlines for, etc.) every important piece of writing I did during my four years in high school.

She still helps me with my resume.

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

That's awesome! Outlines, even!

On the whole, I'm *far* more willing to let people help me with writing now than I was when I was, say, 17. :)

[dancingwolfgrrl.livejournal.com]

I am pretty sure I was required to turn in a college essay in my English class. (I was also required to write an entry for the contest determining who would speak at graduation.) It's distinctly possible that I workshopped the essay, but I wouldn't swear to it.

I'm also pretty sure my parents *didn't* read it, as we were somewhat at odds on the topic of my college plans.

Things that didn't occur to me until at least graduate school:
*One could pay someone to help with or edit one's essay
*One could pay someone to write one's essay
*One might wish to steal an essay written by someone else to increase one's chances at getting into the college of one's choice

Relatedly, I didn't learn until well into music school that people frequently use edited tapes for auditions.

[signsoflife.livejournal.com]

Only tangentially related, my consumption of reality TV informs me that people who use models are eschewing headshots in favor of polaroids taken at the go-see.

[catya.livejournal.com]

I can't actually remember if my mom read mine or not - i'll ask her.

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

I sometimes let someone else poke at my essay, but mostly not. I went to one private (not very academic, alternative, "for kids who would have a hard time anywhere else" boarding) school and several public schools, and one school inA Australia. I got my high school diploma from the 14th school I was enrolled from kindergarten on. I didn't learn to write anything longer than two pages "properly" until I was in college. I only took one college class while I was in high school, and that was drama.

[spike.livejournal.com]

My choices, as usual, were both true, and misleading.
Details available in exchange for ... well... make me an offer.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

*g* I wonder what could have inspired this ;).

Anyway, I don't remember for sure, but I *think* I filled this out correctly. (And for the last question, I assumed you meant high school only -- if you mean my entire K-12 experience, go with option c.)

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

No idea! :)

I'm interested that ~75% of respondents went to public school!

[maighread.livejournal.com]

I very distinctly remember hating the college essay part. I couldn't seem to wrap my head around the idea that a college might like an essay off the beaten path. And so I did a standard boring topic, and hated it.

(Also, went to a "semi-private" school although I checked public. It was not part of the school district and so had it's own board of trustees. But it was the local school and the town paid a lowered tuition rate for the town kids who went. Weird.)

[d3l1r1um.livejournal.com]

I really don't remember, although I remember writing the essay. It was *really* short--like a paragraph or two, but I guess it did the job. I really had no idea how important this stuff was :)

My parents might have read the essay (although I don't think so), but they wouldn't have proofed it in any way. My English was way past theirs by that point.

[clara-girl.livejournal.com]

i was headstrong, ridiculously independent, and insisted on doing the whole fucking process on my own. i would occasionally appear downstairs to get my mother to fill in the appropriate tax-related information for financial aid.

mom said she signed off on whatever needed signing off, and didn't hear a peep from me through the process. my brother was dragged through the process every step of the way. i remember doing it, i remember all the papers on the floor and sitting in the middle, hating the process, but seeing it as my ticket out of the house.

she thanked me, years later, for being so easy.

i went to a public high school, jr high, elementary school. i never went to preschool. i went to a private 4 year college (and got a lot of scholarships to go there), and a private univ for grad school (paid for by tuition remission from my fulltime job there).

it didn't occur to me 'til college that people paid to get their college essays done. i got in multiple fights with my first roommate because she thought i should cheat more and study less (freeing the room for her to watch soap operas).

[desiringsubject.livejournal.com]

I checked "teacher" but it's not strictly true. There were college counselors who were separate from teachers. Mine was Alice Purington. Until Mike Muska, who was gay, arrived, Ms. Purington was passed down in institutional queer knowledge as the one who would get you to the queer friendly schools without telling your parents that that was what was good about the school, if that was necessary.

She was great, but I'm not sure we picked the right series of choices. That said, I really wish I'd had her back when I was transfering!!

[montacute.livejournal.com]

i wrote my college essays at the last minute, as i wrote everything in high school. my mother insisted on looking at the first drafts, and produced the useful contribution of coming back into the kitchen (where we kept the mac on the kitchen table, which was the only space for it) and yelling, "THESE ARE TERRIBLE I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU PRODUCED THIS IT WILL NEVER GET YOU INTO COLLEGE WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU I KNOW YOU CAN WRITE BETTER THAN THIS."

to which i could only yell back, "THERE'S A REASON I DON'T SHOW YOU MY FIRST DRAFTS THEY'LL BE FINE BY TOMORROW MORNING."

which they were.

you didn't include a box on the poll saying "i have been paid to proof/rewrite other people's college essays," but i did that for a while. i still dislike myself for it. i hope -- knowing now what it is like -- that i will never again be in a position where it feels as if the money is worth it. i feel that, if we had metrics to measure our qualities the way we do in video games, i would have been becoming slightly more evil with every month i did that work.

[leeble.livejournal.com]

My mom was an English teacher, of course I had her proof my essay :) But I don't think that I had anyone help with content. It WASN'T DONE.

Public schools - start to finish. Never went to a private school, never worked for a for-profit company. Your tax dollars at work.

[abilouise.livejournal.com]

I am also Cos, but in a way that should for statistical purposes, just be clicking "I had an intellectually privileged childhood". My college essay was actually a mini-sermon that I delivered at my Unitarian Church, where the college guidance counselor for my private high school went, saw me deliver it, and told me that it was my college essay.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Gosh, that must have saved some time.

[pseydtonne.livejournal.com]

I wrote what must have been the best essay the SUNY-Binghamton admissions people had read that year because they gave me their best scholarship.

I remember filling out the SUNY application. You could apply to up to four SUNY schools using one form, $25 per school, so I applied to their best schools (Binghamton and Buffalo). It came time for that "what's one thing that makes you unique?" question and I froze, so I posed the question to my mother.

"Subways!" she bellowed back. "You're obsessed with 'em. They're gonna get five thousand sap-story essays, so why not write something that's actually unique about you, kid?"

I was suspicious, but I wrote it. I explained that I became fascinated by subway trains and stations when I went to Toronto at the age of nine. Then I started writing to transit companies around the world and learning just enough of a language to say "please send me a copy of your subway map." I got a lot of subway maps.

The worst response I ever received was Boston's. They used to charge for the maps at the time (1986) so they sent me 1982's map and a slip with all the route changes. Remember that they had added the Harvard-Alewife extension in 1985, so this was like saying "meh, pay the seventy-five cents ya punk."

The best response was from Brussels, a place I still want to visit. They sent me two full transit system maps, a fold-out explaining how they have private city buses and normal ones, a two-sided poster about art exhibits in the system (one side in French and a very different set of photos on the Dutch side), and the equivalent of our spider map (a subway and streetcar-only line map).

I wrote about the things I needed to learn (research skills, how to use a library, how to learn enough of a language to get by) to pursue my fetish.

Back then it was hard enough for me to get 250 words onto paper. I have more words in this comment than I did in that essay but it did the trick.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

You win.

[wolfkitn.livejournal.com]

schools: here's the simple version. i went to public school until 1st grade; orthodox jewish school for 2nd and third, public from 4th through 8th, and catholic hs for four years. after all that, where better to go than chicago?

the essay story is a bit too long for this forum, but the brief version is that i wrote it alone and showed it to the teacher who most pressed me to go to chicago rather than to the state school. i think he made some grammatical suggestions (some of which i disagreed with) and i more or less sent it in as written. the question was amazing for me, mind-expanding and fun, and completely unlike any other application essay questions i'd seen.