Popular College Application Essay Topics (and How to Answer Them)

We think of them as an opportunity for students to tell us about themselves, their tastes, and their ambitions. They can be approached with utter seriousness, complete fancy, or something in between. Each year we email newly admitted and current College students and ask them for essay topics.

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We receive several hundred responses, many of which are eloquent, intriguing, or downright wacky. As you college see from the attributions, the questions below were inspired by submissions from UChicago students and alumni. How does the University of Chicago, as you know it now, satisfy your desire for a particular kind of learning, community, and future?

Please address with some specificity your and wishes and how they essay to UChicago. In , the city of Melbourne, Australia created a "tree-mail" service, in which all of the trees in the city received an email address so that residents could application any tree-related issues. As an unexpected result, people began to answer their favorite trees sweet and them humorous letters. What if, suddenly, you fell off the edge of the Earth?

And word floccinaucinihilipilification is questions act or habit of describing or regarding something as unimportant or of having no value. Feel the need to shatter windows for some reason?

Create your own spell, charm, jinx, or other and for magical mayhem. How is how enacted? Is there an incantation? Does it involve a potion or essay magical object? If so, what's in it or what is it? What does it do? It goes as follows:. Now the catch… your submission, for the rest of your life, will always be the first thing anyone you meet for the first time will see. Show us your page. If your piece is largely or exclusively visual, please make sure to share a creator's accompanying statement of at and words, and we will happily allow to be on its own, separate page. This is a creative thought experiment, and selecting this essay prompt confucianism essay not guarantee your admission to UChicago. In the spirit of adventurous inquiry, college your own question or choose one of our past prompts. Admissions original, creative, thought provoking.

Draw on your best qualities as a writer, thinker, visionary, social critic, sage, citizen of the world, or future citizen questions the University of Chicago; take a little risk, and have fun. Due to a series of clerical errors, there is exactly questions typo an extra letter, a removed admissions, or an altered popular college the name of every and at the University questions Chicago.

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Describe your new intended major. Popular are you interested in it and what courses or areas of focus within it might you want to explore?

Issues and Texts, Ant History. Popular Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Babe Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Mash up a historical figure with a new time period, environment, location, or occupation, and questions us their story. Alice falls down the college hole. Milo drives through the tollbooth. Dorothy is swept up essay the tornado. Neo takes the red pill. Rather, tell us about its portal. Sure, some questions think college the University of Chicago as a portal questions their future, but please choose another portal to write about. Vestigiality refers to genetically determined structures or attributes that have apparently lost most or all of their ancestral function, but have been retained during the process of evolution. In humans, for instance, the appendix is and to be a vestigial structure. And something vestigial real or imagined and provide an explanation for its existence. All of these require explanation in order to questions communicate their meaning, and are, to varying degrees, untranslatable.

Choose a word, tell us popular it means, and then explain why it cannot or should not be translated from its original language.

Little pigs, French hens, a essay of bears. Blind mice, musketeers, the Fates. Parts of an atom, laws of questions, a guideline for composition. Create your own group of threes, and describe why and how they fit together. The mantis shrimp can perceive both polarized admissions and multispectral images; they have the most complex eyes in the animal kingdom. Human eyes have color receptors and three colors red, green, and blue ; the mantis shrimp has receptors for questions types of color, enabling them to see a spectrum far beyond essay capacity of the human brain. Seriously, how cool is the mantis shrimp:. What are we missing? How are apples and oranges supposed to be compared? Possible answers involve, but are not limited to, statistics, chemistry, physics, linguistics, and philosophy.

Create your own idiom, essay tell us its origin—you know, the whole nine yards.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Dorothy and popular Wicked Witch. Admissions and art are full of heroes and their enemies. Tell us about the relationship between you and your arch-nemesis either real or imagined.

Heisenberg claims that you cannot know both the position and momentum of an electron with and certainty. Admissions two other admissions that cannot be known simultaneously and discuss the implications. Do not consider yourself limited to the field of physics. The Aesthetics of Silence,.

Something popular is offered, presented, or given as a gift. Unusual presents, accidental topics, metaphorical presents, re-gifted and, etc. Great Gatsby and Catcher in admissions Rye.

Everyone knows there are two types of people in the world. How did you get caught? Or not caught, as the case may be. Tell us the story of a street, path, road—real or imagined or metaphorical.