Looking for consructive criticism on my essay.

College Essays
1

<p>It is currently about 460 words, fitting the requirement of 250-500 words.</p>

<p>I am just looking for criticism/feedback/general editing. This is for my common app essay.</p>

<p>As an intelligent adolescent, I constantly struggled to find interest in the subjects I was learning in school. Learning Newton’s Laws of Motion, rules of grammar, and mathematical proofs never really satisfied me; I thrived on ideas, things that weren’t quite as concrete as laws of math and science.Taking classes at Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, or CTY gave me the chance to explore the academic universe.
At CTY, I found my passion, as cheesy and cliché as it sounds. One summer there, I took a Cognitive Psychology course. My instructor, who I’ll call Jake, was a jumpy Japanese man who always tried to be as proper and straight-faced as possible. While all of the other students accepted this, I playfully tried to break down his brick wall of professionalism. I chose to do this by hiding behind large objects, and then jumping out in front of Jake to try and scare him. This soon turned into a game; every time Jake left the room, I would find a new place to hide and scare him when he came back. Whenever Jake finally found me, I met his discovery with a loud “Wahhhhh!” to which he would respond with “OHHHH! Emma, do not scare me like that!”.
Jumping out from behind things to scare people was not, however, the passion I found at CTY. One day we learned about change blindness, a phenomenon that occurs when a person viewing a scene fails to detect a large change because s/he is focusing on something else. So, when Jake left the room, I decided to put it to the test. I knew that he was expecting me to be hiding somewhere when he came back, so his focus would be on finding me. I directed my class in rearranging the furniture in the classroom, including Jake’s own desk. When he came back into the room, Jake completely failed to notice the large physical change in the room for because he was too preoccupied with locating my hiding spot, while I was sitting right in plain view the whole time. In fact, Jake gave up looking for me and began continuing his lesson before noticing the extreme change in the room and finally exclaiming “Woah, what happened here?!” a good five or ten minutes after initially entering the room.
Conducting this experiment showed me how real change blindness and other psychological phenomena are, and sparked my interest in similar psychological fields. I began spending much of my spare time reading case studies and watching psychological documentaries, immersing myself in the field. Simply from a cognitive psychology course at CTY, with the help of my playful disposition and yearning for academic exploration, I realized what I want to do with my life: Become a psychological researcher.</p>

2

<p>I liked the story within the essay, but there’s one thing I learned when I was writing college entry essays last year (I must have written about 10 drafts, ugh…). My advice is to get rid of sentences and paragraphs that seem vague or seem rather out-of-place. For example, your description of your professor and your initial paragraphs actually make it seem like your story is going in a different direction than it actually did. I would suggest introducing psychology as soon as possible, possible even in your first paragraph. Maybe something like:</p>

<p>Intro: “I only though psychology could be studied in text books and lectures, but what I learned at CTY is that it can be a much more hands-on study”
Paragraph 1: “What got me so involved in psychology? A simple, childish game of hiding!” What I’m trying to do here is grab the reader’s attention to 1 specific scenario/story
Paragraph 2: After you’ve introduced the story, short and concise, in Paragraph 1, talk about how it got you thinking, and how it introduced you to all sorts of studies. Maybe talk about specfici books/experiments/classes here :slight_smile:
Conclusion: “The passion I found at CTY is something I want to continue studying for the rest of my college career, it inspires me, I want to help people through my studies, etc.”</p>

<p>Again, just a suggestion :slight_smile: I like where you’re going with the essay</p>

3

<p>This is so helpful! Thank you!</p>