My College Application Essay
It's, like, fine
Everyone and their mother is talking about a kid named Zach Yadegari who, despite a very impressive resume, did not get into the fancy colleges he applied to. Upon request, Yadegari posted his application essay, and everyone immediately agreed that it was shit and the reason he didn’t get into the fancy colleges.
And even Scott Alexander wrote about Yadegari’s essay yesterday:
On Alexander’s post, I commented:
I'm not gonna pretend like my own application essay is some incredible work of artful literature, but it definitely made it obvious that I think of myself somewhat less highly than God. Yadegari's did not meet that standard. You can say that the system of essay-requirement in general is dumb and bad (I agree), but his essay is an exceptionally shitty example of the genre. Everyone knows the first rule of college application essays: don't sound like a dickhead! (And the second rule: don't swear. [Also the third rule: no God talk. {Plus the fourth, which isn't so hard-and-fast and is maybe more a heuristic: everyone has a dead grandparent, don't write about your dead grandparent.}])
To conclusively prove that I’m slightly less of a dickhead than Yadegari, and also that the don’t-be-a-dickhead strategy works, here’s the essay that got me into Yale and Columbia without even owning a business that makes $30 million a year. Fair warning: like every college application essay, it’s incredibly lame.
Will essays be required two years from now?.. I mean, with AI being able to learn from these discussions and not just copy but evolve the style a bit and mix it with the extended (and user-specific) memory window that is becoming available?.. If you were Yale, what would be your admission filter, and would it include essays?