<p>for what it’s worth, three individuals from the admissions group at one particular school at Cornell (I have no reason to believe that it’s significatly different at the other schools) read each essay a candidate submits. A fourth person is sometimes brought in. For the ones who make the cut, the essays are passed on to 3-4 professors in the school. And 90% of what they see is crap, so make it good. The problem is most students spend about 75% of the essay on explaining useless information “I did this, the I did that, then somebody did this, so I did that” instead of stuff the adcoms actually care about “and here is how XYZ affected me”.</p>