"Finding Applicants Who Plagiarize "

psych_2
Tue, 13 Jul 2010 00:51:38 +0000

Addressing the topic of admissions essays in general, not plagiarism…

I think at the undergrad level essays are pretty pointless. There’s so much pressure to be “quirky” or “creative” for, IMO, no good reason. Truth is, at 18, most people don’t really know who they are, and if they do, don’t care to write about that, or they haven’t had much “profound” happen to them. I think both of my college essays were pretty unique and decently written–my common app one (which some of the older posters may have read via PM way back when) started by describing a painting of a girl with polio and then expanded the painting metaphor to all the different ways I had “painted” my own life to be different from the “helpless” view of physical disability in the painting–“painting” tracks down a ski hill in a sitski, for example, or “painting” characters as I wrote kanji learning Japanese. My other essay was on the meaning of the word “speech” and how for me (with a minor speech disability) that word came to mean much more what you said (for example, speaking in Japanese speech contest) than saying it in perfectly articulate way. They were decently written, but I didn’t really like them much. Ironically, I felt constrained by the whole pressure to be “profound” or “quirky” or whatever, and they probably didn’t say anything that my letters of rec combined with my app didn’t already convey.

At the grad school level, the whole essay (Statement of Purpose) thing is much more straightforward, enjoyable, and meaningful. My SOP was simply about my path as a researcher, how that lead to what I wanted to study, how the program and faculty I was applying to worked into that plan and to my professional goals. My SOP still showed who I was but who I was as an academic and a future professional–not a sob story or a motivational speech, or an attempt to be funny, just me. I felt like at that point, I finally had something truly interesting–and somewhat meaningful–to say. I liked my SOP much better than my undergrad essays, and this is speaking as someone who’s hobby is creative writing (fiction mostly, a bit of nonfiction).