Focusing on interest in STEM or humanities in essays?

geekgurl
Tue, 24 Jul 2018 19:27:07 +0000

I’m applying to colleges this fall and my top choices are MIT and a few ivies (Princeton, Yale, Cornell, Dartmouth). I’m also planning to apply to a few top LACs including Williams, Pomona and Swarthmore. (dw I have backups)
Several of the essay prompts are related to an academic interest I had or something I pursued learning out of passion, and I was wondering it’s better to focus on the STEM side or the humanities side. I’m an Asian international (Korea) so I feel like they’re going to expect a perfect STEM skills and interest and they expect the humanities side to be the relative weakness.
In STEM I like physics, math, and computer science, I took all these courses at highest possible level at my school and I have pretty good scores for them. I also have some activities in computer science like volunteering to teach programming or making my own programs.
In humanities I’m a history/polisci fan, I’m really passionate about history (especially the parts related to Russia, Prussia/Germany and Eastern Europe) and I spend quite a lot of my time reading and writing about political thoughts. One weakness if I choose to focus my essays on this would be that I don’t really have explainable activities in this field apart from teaching myself German and Russian little bit. Or would this be an advantage, because my STEM-related activities are already in my activities section and I’m using the essays to demonstrate my interest/passion in the humanities?
I really don’t prefer one over the other, I think I can write essays with an equally passionate/personal voice for both topics.

TL;DR: do you think it’s better to write about STEM or humanities in my essays?
Thank you