More on Essays: What are you like when no one is looking?

Kudos to Laurie Fendrich, blogger for The Chronicle of Higher Education and faculty member at Hofstra University, who weighed in on the exotic essays front, as well: “In pushing college applicants to write college essays proving how “extraordinary” they are, we get application essays about the summer spent hiking in Nepal, the semester abroad learning Chinese, the Saturdays spent at soup kitchens, and the long hours at the violin. But all these extraordinary extracurricular activities are almost always artificially concocted. They’re a result of the savvy, ferocious ambitions of students, their parents and their guidance counselors, all of whom desperately work together to make sure the student looks “extraordinary.” “But what we really need to learn about an applicant is what he or she is like when no one is looking. What is the student like in a quotidien sense? In Katherine, we see a young woman who hadn’t ever done anything glamorous with her summers, but had instead spent day after day, for most of her young life, tending cows—and not because it would make for an interesting subject in a college application essay (although it probably would). She tended cows simply because she grew up in a family where she was required to do serious chores. Katherine seemed to have developed a steely but sincerely felt tenderness toward her cows—a deep affection, no question, but entirely unlike the sentimentality that so often accompanies feelings toward pets.” Katherine, by the way, is entering the freshman class at Cornell this fall.