Unless I am reading this incorrectly, don’t regurgitate facts they already know.
But… How would you use those thing’s are more important. How would you make an impact on the college culture and community? How will you be an active participant on campus?
The way I am reading what you want to do is find something you think that will impress them and by doing that you won’t be impressive at all. You want to separate yourself from the pack by being interesting, unique and it have some personal meaning. Not just a stat of interests.
However, if Professer X works in the “Center for Y” or “The Z lab,” and you can be specific about those programs and how they align with your goals.
If those points are good, how deep do I need to go within them? Should I find a specific robot that they were working on in Michigan’s mcity? Or regarding CMU’s annual Build18 hackathon, should I look into past projects and connect that to myself? Or is simply mentioning these facts good as well?
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You would mention what you’ve learned or researched and then how you (specifically) would utilize that. Lots of kids will mention GT’s Makerspace, but they won’t have the same reasons for mentioning it that you do.
I just want to caution about overthinking or overstressing about this essay. Many colleges are just trying to gauge whether your interest is genuine or you are just sending applications to 20+ schools. Probability would say that your chances are not increased by applying to more schools of equal rank!
As I wrote before, the essays that regurgitate info from the websites are actually pretty tiresome in my opinion. @NiceUnparticularMan has a lot of good advice.
But I mainly came on again to say don’t worry excessively about this. Avoid researching others’ essays. Just be genuine. This essay won’t affect admissions that much, in the grand scheme of things.
The main thing is that it should be about you at this school (which the AO doesn’t know) rather than attrubutes of the school
So don’t write “you have xyz maker spaces”, but “I have been using a basic maker space at abc where I have done xxx but been limited by yyy. Having access to maker spaces with zzz, and having work in them as part of the core curriculum is really exciting to me.” This shows how you see yourself at this school.
This isn’t the most important part of the application, but if you use it as real estate to further show who you are, why you can make good use of the school’s resources, and why you’ll thrive there, it can help.
@Lindagaf at a time when students are not visiting the colleges they apply to, there is little option other than to visit websites and do the kind of research you mention. However, so many of these essays are obviously the result of a quick fishing expedition online. Students don’t want to mention location or other attributes that seem too general or not “unique” enough but instead get very specific about classes, professors, research programs and so on that can be found by googling. The result is often not very “authentic.” The advice above to relate it to the student’s own interests and activities can help. Again, the impact of the Why Us is probably not that great so whatever helps the student churn out the word count ultimately works. I always vote for more organic approaches but without visiting, that’s tough. Other indications of interest might also further the goal of this essay: email contacts with the school and of course visits.