ameliab12

karatekid, is your freshman GPA lower than 3.3? Yes, I'm pretty sure Hopkins is really into creativity and self-expression on the essays. If there's an optional essay, that's your chance to take a chance and say what you didn't get to say on the rest of the app. My mom works at Hopkins and one of her students sent in her optional essay in the form of a scarf she knit that had a few pictures and words to describe herself knitted in! I definitely didn't do anything so extreme on my essays, but I did let them know how much I wanted to be at Hopkins and learn from professors and peers alike.

I'm pulling for you, karatekid! Other kids with not-so-great grades and high test scores are hard to come by on CC; we've got to stick together! :P

karatekid666

@ameliab actually, my freshman gpa was nearly perfect (one B). Sophomore year is when my grades really slipped; I was new to a stem magnet program. Junior year was mediocre :/. I always challenged myself though!

I really hope that Hopkins is a fan of me, too!!

This may be a lot to ask, but could you possibly, maybe, read my JHU supplement when I get it done?!

rspence

@karatekid666 MIT.

karatekid666

@rspence MIT was my dream school! But then I woke up.. :/

rspence

:/

As a side note, MIT takes their "essays" differently...they put a lot of short-answer questions instead of one highly-polished essay. Which is kind of nice because my essay writing skills are only average...

ameliab12

Karatekid, sure, feel free to send it to me in a personal message and I'll try to get to it ASAP (though I may be a bit busy with my own college work)! I love editing! And hopefully I'll be able to give a pretty unbiased opinion that you can't get elsewhere, seeing as I don't know you. However, I must stress that you shouldn't ever put too much trust in people of the interwebs or let them influence you too much. I swear I'm a nice person and I want to help you, but that doesn't necessarily mean I know what's best for you essay-wise.

ameliab12

Rspence, I actually found it pretty hard to condense everything for the 100 word essays. University of Maryland had some standard essays, but then there were 10 140-character things where you just finish their sentence. I had some pretty great answers for a bunch of them (in my not-so-humble opinion), but I got fed up when I saw "One thing I didn't expect to get out of a volunteer experience was..." It aggravated me because I knew they wanted me to write about having my eyes opened and meeting new people or something cheesy like that. Instead, I just wrote "monetary compensation." :P

rspence

@ameliab12, haha yeah I hate when they thwart questions like that.

"One thing I didn't expect to get out of a volunteer experience was...nothing, because I got what I expected."

A friend I know completely trolled his Princeton essay...the topic was to describe a person who influenced him, and he wrote about a girl named Kotomi Ichinose who endured a hard life and lost both her parents in a plane crash...then mentioned at the bottom that Kotomi was from an anime. He got waitlisted...but it was a pretty brilliant essay IMO

karatekid666

Thanks ameliab! IM SO EXCITED. But not really : (

ameliab12

@rspence, that's pretty funny! The best story I've ever heard heard was a kid who had an essay that said to ask himself a question and then answer it. His entire essay was, "Do you play tuba? No." ...he got into Brown.
There's also a really funny essay by a guy named Hugh Gallagher that got him into NYU (and got famous on the Internet): SS > jokes > Hugh Gallagher's 'College Essay'

@karatekid, it's always easy to freak out over small things when they're right in front of you. Try to remember that the world doesn't explode if your essays aren't perfect or even if you get rejected from a few colleges. Life goes on and so do you.