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	Archive through November 07, 2002	7		11/07 10:12am

i say go with it. It tells them about who you are, whether or not they love or hate wrestling.

By Malik (Malik) on Thursday, November 07, 2002 - 10:39 pm: Edit

Yep, i already sent the essay out, just wanted some feedback for my own sake.

P0et - want to back up that grade? Any idiot can give a paper a number, give me a reason why it's a 4.

By me on Saturday, November 09, 2002 - 05:07 pm: Edit

Considering you're sending this essay to a school as competitive as UPenn, I'd give you about a 3/10 for this. And those are bonus points for the nice touch of adding incomplete sentences at the beginning and end, showing some creativity. But the essay itself, it lacks DEPTH. There's no indication of overcoming adversity or how the triumph touched your life. It's a lackluster piece that feels superficial and even condescending at times. You don't want to show traces of traits such as arrogance, and that's exactly what you did (The line where you mentioned how you 'smirked' and your over-confidence).

Also, it's long-winded and over-written - there's too many sentences in this that could be cut out (e.g. "The rest of the day was pretty quiet, and I didn’t see much action for a couple of hours. It was late, and everyone was ready to leave. There was one more match left before we could leave.").

The introduction of the essay - it doesn't grab the reader at all. Since you're applying early, it'll still be read but I fear that they won't bother going past the first paragraph. Droning on and on about superfluous details, doesn't show any deeper personal exploration, etc. Yes, you say that getting pinned was a lesson, but WHAT DID IT TEACH YOU?

By P0et (P0et) on Sunday, November 10, 2002 - 12:08 am: Edit

Horrible sentences. We're talking about UPenn not some community college.

By vince on Sunday, November 10, 2002 - 05:19 am: Edit

i agree with, your essay is enormously boring.

you seem to like that word alot, the enormous gym and the tremendously long halls.

i struggled to read through your essay. your attempts at humour (spandex) are overused. i think the worst aspect of your essay is that it leaves the reader thinking he/she has wasted his time. what are you trying to say? you dont show anything part of your personality, only that you are a bad wrestler and a bad writer.

unless you survived cancer and ran the marathon i doubt you'd get in.

By wow on Sunday, November 10, 2002 - 09:19 am: Edit

The essay is horrible. You're just telling a sequence of events with absolutely no plot! What did you learn. You're cocky in your writing and again, you lack any substance. It's bad.

By lovelylu on Sunday, November 10, 2002 - 12:30 pm: Edit

Don't listen to people. I think its okay, its not that boring, honestly, if you wrote 5 pages about this subject yes it would be brutal, but such a short concise story cannot be that boring. It demonstrates something that you are passionate about. I'd say it wont help or hurt you...

By Malik (Malik) on Sunday, November 10, 2002 - 03:04 pm: Edit

Me: Thanks, I'll try to fix those areas up a bit:
P0et: You're still too vague. Don't even bother making another post, you're wasting my time and patience.
Vince: I used "enormous" once and "tremendous" once. And then you just rewrote what Me said.
Wow: It's an autobiography, you twit. This is just a page of a long sequence of events that occur in my life, and this is just a day of the 17 years i lived.
Lovelylu: Thanks a bunch for not taking unneccessary shots ("Bad wrestler," vince? That was a bit jackass-like, you know?) and I'll make it a little shorter.

By wow on Sunday, November 10, 2002 - 03:53 pm: Edit

Even if it's an autobiography you need to write what that day meant to you. You obviously don't have to listen though. Just trying to help. Overall the essay is not personal just a stupid story that's extremely boring.

By hoopla on Sunday, November 10, 2002 - 10:47 pm: Edit

be unique!

By hoping on Sunday, November 10, 2002 - 11:16 pm: Edit

to which college/program at Upenn are you applying?
less description, more feeling.

By dick on Sunday, November 10, 2002 - 11:20 pm: Edit

Ok Malik, I think I speak for all of your detractors (that means people who disagree with you) when I say YOU are a jackass. You post your crap on this website and then get defensive when we point out what a horrible writer you are. If you do get into UPenn, try to take classes where you neither have to interact with your professor and classmates nor write too much (preferably not at all.) Best wishes!

By Malik (Malik) on Monday, November 11, 2002 - 12:04 am: Edit

I'm guessing your screenname for the forums isn't just your real name, dick.

I didn't post my essay for people to take cheap shots at it, I posted it to get some constructive criticism. So far, Me is the only person who's giving me stuff to work on, the rest of you assholes probably didn't even read my essay and are just being little bitches because, quite frankly, i can't do anything about it. Did you read my essay, dick?

No, you didn't. I'm not assuming, I know.

By Jesse on Sunday, December 01, 2002 - 12:14 am: Edit

It does lack depth i think, although it has a good base for improvement....however the autobiography is page 217 out of 300...which would probably be towards the second third of your life, prob in your 50s to 70s years, you should have realized this..the point is to be creative and imaginitive in your future.

By Richard Allen on Sunday, December 01, 2002 - 02:50 pm: Edit

Actually the Penn Adcom was adamant in saying that you did not to be true to any timeline. Page 217 could be when you had just been born, or when you were on your deathbed, or any time in between.
In fact, no one said your essay needed to be in chronological order. It could be arranged by topic. Who knows? You all need to get out of the standard scholastic thinking mode, its making you dumber...

By Richard from FL on Sunday, December 01, 2002 - 02:51 pm: Edit

In essence, the topic should be read as: "write anything you wish about yourself"

By Pat57575 (Pat57575) on Sunday, December 01, 2002 - 06:47 pm: Edit

I say it's a pretty good essay falling a little short in a couple areas. The detail and dialogue are defintely a plus... but a little more reflection would have been nice. You set the scene nicely, but you should have told us clearly what you learned from the experience and how it changed you.

btw, all of your criticists who went to thesaurus.com before making their comments are in for a surprise... the last thing the admissions officers want to see is an arrogant know-it-all

By Jesse on Sunday, December 01, 2002 - 07:18 pm: Edit

Excuse me, its making ME dumber? Thats very funny. I don't know what the "Penn Adcom" is, but the exact question on the app, since 'I' filled it out and wrote the essay is "You have just finished your 300 page autobiography, tell us what is on page 217." Timelines, like you said, are not mentioned...but how would you write an autobiography on 17 years of your life, what about the rest of your life...you can't just keep on writing about being depressed about school because i didn't get a good grade, or the girl sitting in front me is cute, I should ask her out. The point is to be as creative as possible in an autobiography setting, there are borders to this assignment, not "write anything you wish about yourself"...since of course Penn does not want stuck up, conceited bastards at their school.

By tim on Sunday, December 01, 2002 - 11:02 pm: Edit

Actually Richard is right. Say something extraordinary happened to you yesterday. Make it page 217! Say you wanted to write about when you were 1 years old...make it page 217! I mean...who say's you're writing this autobiography when you're almost dead...couldn't you be writing it now...when you're 17 or 18? It's much more creative to not be bound by what you think your age would be at 217.

By munchyM&M on Sunday, December 01, 2002 - 11:40 pm: Edit

I wrote about the future which to most people seems unusual. In fact I believe that in writing about the future I was being kind of risky, as I had come accross the following when I was trying to figure out what to write for my college essay:

"Remember," said Lee Stetson, Dean of Admissions at the University of Pennsylvania, "when you're reading 18,000 essays, it's a challenge. We want to stimulate them to write something interesting to us."

In the late 1980s, Stetson said, he and his Penn colleagues went on a retreat at the Jersey shore to discuss, among other things, improving the essay question. From that getaway, this question was devised: "You have just completed your 300-page autobiography. Please submit page 217." Stetson said 70 percent of Penn's applicants pick it over two other options.
_____________________________________________
"What we're trying to do is allow them flexibility to get to the kind of person they are through the essay," Stetson said. "It lets us find out a little bit more about how they think, what their priorities are, what they're interests are, and how they've learned about life by the age of 17. It's all part of the package, to learn more about applicants so we can make better decisions."

It is also a way to let colleges brag a little, Stetson adds.
_______________________________________________
and no, I did not just type that all myself. You can find it if you would like at: http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~opportun/issues/1999-00/issue6.htm

Thus I see no fault in writing about the past, and hope that writing about my future will not be seen as a bad, but creative choice!

By Richard from FL on Monday, December 02, 2002 - 12:34 am: Edit

Thanks for the bashing guys. Arrogance is sometimes confused with confidence in one's feelings (usually based on some sort of prior knowledge). Were I to insist that 4+4 is 8, and you disagreed with me, would I be arrogant then? I'm not trying to be mean or abusive towards any of you, please don't take this as if I am attacking any of you personally, its just, too often, people fail to reveal their best attributes because they are afraid to take a risk and to do something different. Also, I did not thesaurize my post, I have better ways to spend my time. I honestly hope everyone here gets into their top choice, but seriously, writing like the OP's impresses few, and, for an applicant without a major hook, it is the essay that put your application into the admit pile. I hope everyone realizes that I am not making any of this up, and this is all very well meaning advice. Work hard.
Richard

By Richard from FL on Monday, December 02, 2002 - 12:40 am: Edit

Also, I am not a stuck up conceited bastard. I am sure UPenn doesn't want people who resort to name calling at their school either.

By munchyM&M on Monday, December 02, 2002 - 12:51 am: Edit

What I posted was not to bash anybody but solely to support whoever stated that the question is lenient (or that i hope it is) so i hope nobody takes it as an attempt to bash what anybody says. Personally when I read the question I had no clue how to procede answering it...thus i did a little research and came up with what i posted...and im babbling so, yea. no hard feelings. this is college and although it seems very life or death now 4 years is a fraction of life. So let's all do our best and get on with it, whatever it may be.

By Richard from FL on Monday, December 02, 2002 - 01:02 am: Edit

Good luck with your writing. For ideas, I would recommend asking a friend to describe you. That should get you going. If you think that this would make your friend fudge on answers, just do something fun with some buddies. You will think of something. For editing, I recommend Strunk and White's the Elements of Style. There are some good example essay in Michelle Hernandez's Admissions Confidential. I got my idea to use dialogue from there (never, ever steal a topic from published examples). Good luck. I hope you end up where you are happiest.

By munchyM&M on Monday, December 02, 2002 - 01:42 am: Edit

ooooo, like i said i already wrote my penn essay about the future. sent it early. Nonetheless, I am currently working on my other 1000 essays, and I actually bought that book for AP english and its been at the bottom of my locker ever since. Thanks for the tip. I'l dig the book up. And, actually what I posted largely supports your (and my for that matter) view of the question. So I say all you kiddies do as Richard tells you and go write whatever you want as an essay applying creativity to fulfill the task of it being page "217"ish and moreover to please/entertain the admissions committee..."To each his own," right?

By Richard from FL on Monday, December 02, 2002 - 02:08 am: Edit

I like the sarcasm, but I hope they take your advice literally.

By Pat57575 (Pat57575) on Monday, December 02, 2002 - 06:01 pm: Edit

hmm, richard, were you the one who posted under the name "me"? I'm sure you had the right intentions... I just thought whoever it was looked a bit condescending themself, throwing out SAT words like "superficial" and "superfluous" while criticizing someone else for poor writing. By the way 2+2=5 according to big brother.

By Richard from FL on Monday, December 02, 2002 - 06:05 pm: Edit

I have never posted under the name me...

By Pat57575 (Pat57575) on Monday, December 02, 2002 - 06:44 pm: Edit

ok, well then my comments weren't directed towards you (thesaurus, arrogant, etc...)