<p>[Yoot</a> Saito](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoot_Saito]Yoot”>Yoot Saito - Wikipedia) FTW.</p>
<p>Back to the questions:
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<p>If you could query admissions officers (and get totally honest reactions) I think you’d hear a mix of different responses. What I can give you will be limited to my experience with the Tufts process. </p>
<p>Packaged voices tend to be plentiful in our pool. For the most part, all that packaging looks and sounds the same. I know, from my own college application, the kind of pressure there is to talk about how much you value diversity, or want to save the world, or how much ‘passion’ you have. These are all important qualities, but they should appear organically in an application. And the truth is that simply having these qualities is not enough: your application should leave me with a sense of your intellectual potential. Nuance and subtlety are perhaps the most effective way to demonstrate that potential. But after going the process myself and now talking with many ‘admissions consultants’ as a profession, I know that most of that ‘Packaging’ encourages students to think of admissions officers as fools who need to be spoon fed exactly what we want to hear. Nuance is eschewed as risky, and an applicant-centered approach is rejected as dangerous.</p>
<p>This is the answer I give every single time anyone asks me about college essays: tell me what YOU want to say. The application is about you, not about me. </p>
<p>I suspect its a perspective derived from being on the ‘youthful’ side of the spectrum, and working in an office with a median age of about 30 years. As an office, we’re close enough to the current culture of the admissions process, and to the current voices of 17 year olds. There’s a difference between a smart 35 year old voice and a brilliant 17 year old voice, even if that 17 year old is remarkably mature. At times, that difference is subtle, but I can generally still hear it. It’s awfully hard to trust the insight given in an essay if you harbor suspicions around the voice that wrote it.</p>
<p>There are some excellent ‘consultants’ out there, who want to get to know their clients so they can encourage them to find their own path and understand their own potency, and I understand the validity to that. Without facetiousness, I recognize how hard it can be to come to terms with ones own gifts, and having an outside perspective can be useful. </p>
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<p>Really well! I’m still sane, but I might be whistling a different tun at the end of March.</p>