Is this type of "meta" essay a bad idea

College Essays
1

I have sorta written my common app essay. It was about how I write music that captures the emotion and detail of a story, I can use that to remember things, dream, and process life (I use it to fight anxiety, sadness, etc). It is also about the death of my piano teacher.

The essay is good, it shows me as being unique but it is really missing luster. I can’t imagine an admissions person looking over a pile of essays he/she just read and saying “I want the composer”. It doesn’t show my ambition, my computer science anything, my goals, or how I think in technical situations. I would rather write about those subjects, however those ultimately lead to even less compelling essays and are redundant with my activities.

I was wondering how would an essay about me thinking about how to present myself be? I have an introduction draft that I can send people but the idea so far is to go like this. (These are ideas I would present in about that order)

  1. I was trying to figure out how to get into CS programs that did not fit my chances, but did fit my dreams
  2. Some of the schools I am looking at are a stretch, here’s why. And yes I am ambitious.
  3. I am so ambitious that I spend most of my time programming, and composing. Then qualify how much time I spend on these extracurricular pursuits and a little about what I do.
  4. I have thought about changing these areas of science. But will admissions people not like me to put these down because they will likely never work.
  5. I genuinely think I can change the world

What do you think about the essay idea?

PS: The irony is that this essay was originally a post I was writing to the users of this site. I was hoping to ask how colleges felt about students with ideas that probably won’t work, cliche dreams of changing the world, and students that are perhaps overly ambitious. In an effort to provide background for the question I described myself, the admissions struggle I feel I am facing and then went on to say some ambitious ideas. I didn’t post it because as I was proofreading before posting I realized it might make a good essay and I didn’t want to trip plagiarism checkers.

2

Meta-essays can be interesting, but they often don’t show much beyond the writer’s abilities to think, imagine, and reflect. Which, those aren’t bad things to portray, but meta-essays can really limit a person in that sense. They also limit readers’ ability to draw their own conclusions about you based on your real-world actions, they’re often devoid of the dialogue and imagery that exists in the real world.

Your idea sounds interesting, but there’s a fine line between being realistic and being overly self-deprecating. Be confident about your ideas no matter how ambitious they might seem, or no one else will be confident either. If you can convince adcoms that your ambition is unwavering and that you’re willing to put in the sheer amount of time and effort it will take to make meaningful changes in CS, then I think they’ll understand why your ambition is leading you to reach schools.

And who knows? People make changes in their fields all the time, especially in fields like CS, which people are always striving to make more efficient and applicable to new fields.