Salamence156

I've begun to think about my college essays, and I've stumbled upon my first Supplemental Essay for Stanford about Intellectual Vitality.

For reference:
"Stanford students are widely known to possess a sense of intellectual vitality. Tell us about an idea or an experience you have had that you find intellectually engaging."

With the recent ***ushima incident, I've had a lot of discussions with my friends (and teachers) about the risks/benefits of Nuclear Energy.

If I were to write about Nuclear Energy and reference ***ushima, would I be going into a realm of certain rejection because of the controversiality (just made up a word, LOL) of the topic, and just write about a different topic? Or should I go on with writing about Nuclear Energy?

*I will be writing about my opinions on Nuclear Energy, etc.

Edit: Some of my other ideas are:
-Writing about the TV Show "Snapped"
-The History behind Korean Historical Dramas (weird, I know...)

phantasmagoric

lol @ CC replacing letters with asterisks for a Japanese word

Are you passionate about it? Is it something you've worked on or read a lot about? The IV essay is probably the most important of the shorter essays, since Stanford emphasizes that quality in its literature and the IV essay question hasn't changed for at least 15 years. As such, you should definitely reserve it for something that's important to you. They always say you need to show "passion," and while that quality should be present throughout the entire application, it's especially important for that essay. I don't think that the incident is very controversial anyway in the context of an essay. So it's not the possible controversial nature of the incident that would make me wary of it, but rather that it's not really what you're passionate about - as you say, you've had discussions, but have you delved into the issue much more? If I'm wrong, then by all means talk about it, but do make sure that it's explored in a way that displays your intellectual vitality.

Search the forums; the IV essay is probably the most discussed topic on essays.

simba9

I just want to see if ****ake mushroom makes it through.

simba9

Guess not.

StanfordOneDay

****take . .

ambition44

WRITE ABOUT KOREAN DRAMAS!!!

hehe you don't have to. It would be cool though. I would totally write about how I learned Korean by listening to kpop but that's probably not going to be able to compete against the deep philosophy intellectual essays...