<p>I am still considering sending Harvard an essay titled “Vignettes of Travels” that details several short moments in my life and their significance to me. Is this too much of a risk, if the essay is about four or five pages in all? I understand that they have a lot of applications and most likely will not read it all, but it can’t hurt, right?</p>
<p>What do you think?</p>
<p>just send 1 vignette</p>
<p>protip: don’t post your essays on this board</p>
<p>I just copy and pasted this into a word document and saved it. Looks like I got my harvard essay.</p>
<p>Desafinado, thanks and good point about posting on the board. What did you think of the essay?</p>
<p>It is not bold… it would be bold to pick an unusual subject or style choice. This would be dumb instead. If the admissions officer does not finish reading your essay, I guarantee you will NOT be admitted at Harvard or any other top (or mid-level) college.</p>
<p>DISCLAIMER: I wrote this comment when the original poster still had his essay on the forum. Hopefully that makes more sense.</p>
<p>It’s definitely interesting, that’s for sure, and it ties into your personal values, so that’s good as well. My problems with it are as follows:</p>
<p>It is much more like a story than an essay, and I don’t know how they’ll respond to that.
Also, your writing is very adjective-ey. It’s as if you’re trying too hard to write “well,” so you tack on adverbs and adjectives onto everything to get a perfect level of detail. It may come off as a little artificial. The phrasing of some ideas comes off as a tad pretentious too (“I mustered my cerebral faculties for a mental situation report” — this isn’t a William Gibson novel haha). Although, if you’re going for a tone of wisdom beyond your years because you’re talking about childhood, it might fit.</p>
<p>Furthermore, a lot of the descriptions/references/speculations are a bit too tangential and spontaneous for their own good. There is a long lead-up to the actual body of the essay, which is running. Is it really necessary to devote such a large part of the essay to the description of the clock tower and the snowball? Also, it’s sort of hard to believe that someone would aim at an elevated clock tower and end up hitting a fat Swiss kid. Not doubting that it happened, but it does give the whole situation an air of “too good to be true.” Lastly, the James Bond reference at the end is out of left field. I can see how it fits, but simply throwing in James Bond to cite an example of a great person seems like an attempt to spice up the writing where no spice needs to be added.</p>
<p>That said, I think it’d be a great addition to an application with a slight amount of revision, and these are just my thoughts. Most likely, others will disagree with me.
Good luck on your application!</p>
<p>UPDATE: Good idea on deleting your essay from the board, hopefully you’ll still take these ideas into consideration.</p>
<p>Do you think it would be a good idea to include just this one, or to include several ‘vignettes?’</p>
<p>Also, thanks for the comments. I agree with them completely and appreciate the help.</p>
<p>Only send additional content if you can imagine yourself being accepted and saying “it was probably the additional content that got me in.” In other words, don’t send it unless it’s better than everything else in your application.</p>