So, you want to go to college, but you’re not diverse. Peter Woods offers tips on how to write a diversity essay that will impress college admissions officials with your sensitivity and correct thinking.
The key to a good college-application diversity essay is drama. One of the best approaches is to compose a story that captures the moment at which one of the deep truths of “diversity” crystallized for you. There are three such diversity deep truths (DDTs), and you can choose the one best suits your taste: (DDT 1) the reality of prejudice in American life, (DDT 2) the sheer thrill of encountering cultural difference, and (DDT 3) pride in one’s own diversity.
Sample opening lines:
“When I was six, I wanted more than anything to have braids like my friend Shareen.”“I was the only one at school who knew that my friend Phyllis was homeless. She lived with her mother at the Motel Six, but when we started work on the senior class play…”
“I met Orlando when I was tutoring kids in math at Mandela School…”
“I never thought that it would be Daryll, who has Down’s Syndrome, who would teach me the most important lesson in life.”
Woods advises students to go for the small epiphany to show sensitivity to slightest hint of bias. His advice is quite good, which is depressing.
I just volunteered to help genuinely disadvantaged students write college essays. At least, they won’t need to invent imaginary friends to teach them imaginary lessons.
For one of my college application essays I wrote why my school’s chapter of NHS was a giant fraud that lacked morals and integrity. It was pretty harsh. I recived a letter from the selection committee saying it was “interesting” and “different”. I refused to write on the diversity essay. Ah, good times.
I started to comment here, then decided I’d give it the full-blown blog treatment. See my response to Peter Wood in the Sept 30 entry at http://faculty.deanza.fhda.edu/jocalo
FWIW, John, I know plenty of libertarians who consider themselves classical liberals and believe that modern US liberals gave the word a working over long before Gingrich and co. started working on it.
Of course, partially that’s because of the previous demonizing of the word “socialist” in the US, although that still doesn’t explain why the term “social democrat” never caught on in the US. Plenty of people who are quite comfortably described by those two terms prefer to call themselves “liberal” (or now, once again, “progressive”) in the US.
To blame it all on Gingrich, and to pretend that the modern US political philosophy called liberal is the same as that of Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment is quite dishonest. Trying to claim the entire history of liberal democracy for a statist worldview quite different from the original meaning of the word seems dishonest to me as well.
Ah, an error. Part of the second paragraph above should read, “are quite comfortably described by those two terms in Europe and elsewhere.”
Damn.
So this is why I didn’t get into a good school. My essay was on my volunteer work with “English First.”
True to say I have a dream to live for a year in England or America or Canada and study there in a university for a year. That would be great to live there and study. Do you know how simple person can go there for free?
Natalia, there isn’t any such thing as “free.” All you can do is pay for what you want with something other than money. What can you do that someone would value enough that they would offer to give you what you want?
Your first step is to find someone who is in a position to give you what you would like to have. Your second step is to find out if you have (or can get) something they would like to have. Your third step is to bring the two things together and make them work out.
This is what we call the “free market.” It’s the basis of all civilized culture. It’s the first lesson you need to learn in order to be a success in the places where you want to go. Good luck.
And they say God has no sense of humor…..
Hell, they’ve been doing this for years. I had to write one when I was in college. My advice (I aced the bugger): Stick to total fiction. Actual truth should be avoided at all costs. It never sounds as good as a well-constructed lie.
I’m very proud of my college entrance essay. I was ‘non-traditional’ student (old - 26), so I had a few more experiences than the usual 17 year olds. I wrote a great essay on my year-long battle with the State Tax Commision and the wonderful lessons I learned. I lessened my culpability but not completely - I was “a little stubborn” and I had “made a few mistakes on the forms.” And I didn’t make out the tax collectors as complete orgs - I was applying to a state university - I “came to understand their position” (they wanted my hard earned $$$). And I even included a few black folks for that little righteous kick.
Time for some more University of Chicago blog chauvinism. Here is this year’s application - the essays are on page 8.
The questions are too long for me to type them all, but here’s my favourite:
“One of the very nicest things about life,” as Luciano Pavarotti once said, “is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating.” Pavarotti, in all his well-fed wisdom, suggests that eating and meals are a separate kind of activity - often a break from the work and play of life. Yet food and meals sustain our lives in many ways every day. Tell us about an ordinary food or meal that may seem mundane to the rest of the world, but holds special meaning for you. Think about how the food was prepared, packaged, or served and by whom. Do you eat it in a distinctive manner? At a special time? In a certain place or with select company? Most importantly, explain how this everyday food sustains or satisfies you in a way that another food or meal could not.
Somewhere, Daniel Drezner is smiling.
John Thacker correctly points out that the demonizing of political labels has a long history, one that history professor Newt Gingrich did not initiate. Certainly Sen. Joseph McCarthy did a nice job on “communist” and Vice-President Spiro Agnew made his contribution with “radical liberals.” But Gingrich orchestrated his effort to tag the opposition by teaching a satellite course to Republican candidates all over the US, beamed from a small Georgia college that he conned into letting him use for his anti-Democrat campaign. What would be truly liberal would be analysis and discussion that avoided all the labeling and tried to understand the different viewpoints.
John - we’ve done the analysis and tried to understand the view points but they don’t stand up to rational analysis so the labels stick: radical-lefty-activist-femo-islamo-fasci-nazi-greenie-lefty-commie-whatever.
Labels are applied so that you have a quick way of referring to an item/object/ideology/whatever.
Here in Australia its known as calling a spade a bloody shovel.
I doubt the Down’s Syndrome essay will work - those people are supposed to be murdered in the womb in order to protect our eugenic purity. Or something.
“At least, they won’t need to invent imaginary friends to teach them imaginary lessons. ”
For the first 2 years after my eldest daughter learned to talk in sentences, she would tell us things that “my old teacher” would tell her. We never figured out who this teacher was since she had never been to any kind of daycare. We figured it was just her way of coming to grips with the new things she was learning. Or she was remember the early childhood schooling of a previous life–but that’s a different subject.
Razor,
Here we call it sloganeering, and it’s a nice way to use language without actually having to think about it. It obviates any sort of intelligent discussion, and lets you just sling names at things you don’t like.
Or, if you’d prefer the Australian version, it’s calling you a dipshit.
The modern university seems to regard itself as the temple of moral probity, rather than an establishment meant to introduce people to a larger world view and to think in a manner that allows them to form opinions of their own. In this respect it seems to have more in common with the madrassas of the north-west frontier (bin Laden U) than the dreaming spires.
This is a perversion.