| what i meant was that stanford's programs are all excellent, in terms of the education you'd be getting, not that everyone there is good at everything. what that translates to is me being able to know for sure that no matter what major i choose (because i'm very undecided as of now), i can be sure that i'll have excellent resources, whereas at a more specialized school (like MIT for example), if i decided to go the english route, i would be sort of in the dark. it also means that the student population is going to be diverse in terms of interest - kids who are pre-med, pre-law, english, history, chem, engineering, computer science, etc etc majors will all be in class with me, whereas, again, at a more specialized school you might not get all that diversity. and that is something that's important to me, because you get to hear different perspectives on things (i.e., someone with a sciences background is going to approach a humanities question differently than an english major).
as for the intellectual vitality question - no, i don't think it necessarily has to be academic, but you do want to show something about your "passion" (i put that in quotes just because i hate the word after all those college essays, lol) for learning/thinking/being intellectual/whatever. i know that's ridiculously vague, but try to think of a time when you were honestly excited about learning something new. i'm not sure you could pull the inspiration thing here (especially because i think they have a 300-char question on that?) because, while you may <i>say</i> that you've got it, it doesn't particularly show anything about your intellectual energy. (this follows the whole "show, don't tell" mantra about personal essays in general). i hope this clarifies things, let me know if you have more questions! | 
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