They are special enough if the adcoms say they are. I have always been a rule follower, and raised my children to be rule followers. I now believe I may have done them a disservice, since taking rules too seriously can stifle creativity and out-of-the-box thinking. One quality both older kids noticed in their elite college classmates–especially those from privileged backgrounds–is that many held the belief that nothing is impossible or out of the question for them. Having come from a very modest background, my kids have always had financial limits, not to mention other types of limits. However, the movers and shakers in the Ivy League world think that if anyone can do it, they can. It’s a mindset of unlimited possibilities, and probably exactly the mindset elite schools want to see in their students. Of course there’s a dark side to this self concept of specialness too.
While it’s great to think outside the box, in this circumstance it would have been very easy to clean up a few words and still maintain the creative, playful quality of the piece. It’s well written. Its just over written. There are many degrees of rule following. Some are more important than others. If you speed you may or may not get caught and may or may not get a ticket. But unless there is a compelling reason why you are speeding, the rules should be the same for you and the person behind you.
The power of the essay lay not in the skills of the student writer, but in the power of Costco. It opens doors.
A few years ago, a member of the Scripps family of the San Diego-area Scripps, used her Costco card to get through airport security. It was all the ID she had on her, and she flashed it. It worked.
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• Did anyone else notice that her essay is 5 words over the limit. …and it would have been 12 words over if she hadn’t invented 7 doublewords !
o Wow, really? That is the depths of triviality you want to plumb?
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Calm down @fallenchemist . I was just pointing out an interesting fact that a) explains her invention of words like dollarfifty and buffalochicken and b) indicates that the published essay is not exactly the essay she pasted into the Common App.
I’m glad many of you admire her essay. I found it a fun read, but it certainly has the flaws mentioned by others: not really answering the prompt, and awkward (bordering on nonsensical) wording (“finitudes and infinitudes.”)
Of course I’m biased, but I think my son’s essay was better. 
I can’t imagine reading this essay and actually stopping to count the number of words to “catch” whether it fit into the word limit. I have no life sometimes and am addicted to CC sometimes, but wow. That’s a new level here.
(Thought it was just me thinking this^^^)
The word count was written elsewhere. This wasn’t news. Just someone mentioned it up thread.
It took about 5 seconds to cut and paste into Word and the wordcount appears at the bottom.
I suppose the windows in your car roll down with the push of a button, too, @pickpocket.
Since someone used the speed limit analogy, it is pretty common knowledge that if you go 38 in a 35 or 70 in a 65, you won’t get stopped. Please spare me the stories of tiny town speed traps, I am sure there are a few exceptions. And they get known and people avoid going that way and they lose business, so they stopped doing it. I repeat, if you go 38 in a 35 or 70 in a 65, you won’t get stopped. The analogy is actually excellent, as it turns out.
@maya54 well it did say she was the top of her class so I would assume pretty good…
Sure @Waiting2exhale , attack the messenger instead of having a thoughtful discussion of this essay.
@pickpocket: Did you need me to put the ‘wink’ emoticon there? I rolled up no sleeves.
Ok, all’s cool @Waiting2exhale . It struck me harsher than you must have meant. 
So some speed limits are flexible. The word count in the common app is not flexible.
If you pay your taxes a day late, they are late. Of course this year it’s persnickety because they are due April 18 except in those states that celebrate patriots day, where they are due April 19.
It’s kind of disheartening that this girl wrote a really great essay and has a resume that is really strong - top test scores, excellent grades, a great resume - and what people repeatedly focus on is her race/ethnicity.
And the essay is really great. It’s not perfect, but nobody’s is, and having graded lots of undergraduate student papers she’s definitely an above-average writer for a college freshman-to-be.
I agree, juillet. But each year when the stories come out about the one or two kids who hit the jackpot and were admitted to all or most of the Ivies, they are always a URM and are almost always black. People are just connecting the dots, that’s all.
And the girl chose to talk about it herself, both on her applications and in the media interviews.
@TheGFG The only reason you think they are “almost always black” is because those are the ones that make the news. I know as a fact from working as an admissions officer that many white students from certain private schools hold offers from most, if not all, of the Ivy Group universities. And they’ve also been admitted to UC Berkeley, UCLA, Amherst etc. There are also some famous American schools in England, France and Singapore where white students routinely get admitted to a half dozen or more elite universities a piece.
I’d also invite you to walk around any elite university and what do you see? Mostly white males. White students are not an endangered species at any elite university. And while were at it, the US is the only country in the world to distinguish between ‘white’ and ‘hispanics’ or Latinos. Add in those students who have been artificially removed from the ‘white’ student account and white students are even more represented.