<h1>le essai optionnel</h1>
<p>Share with us a few of your favorite books, poems, authors, films, plays, pieces of music, musicians, performers, paintings, artists, blogs, magazines, or newspapers. Feel free to touch on one, some, or all of the categories listed, or add a category of your own.</p>
<p>Seeing the film adaptation of Les Mis</p>
<p>Yo soy yo y mi color.
Every person can be represented by a color. It identifies one’s personality, interests and goals in life. For me, that color is turquoise – I have the analytical, science-orientated mind of blue[1], but I also have the intuitional, creative mind of green[2]. Whether it is art or science, I could utilize both processes of my brain well together. To me, that is my soul. Turquoise is my soul. I yearn for the bridge between intuition and logic, to see how it works together. Sadly, many people think logical thought and creative inspirations cannot co-exist. But there are many examples in life that show that they can.</p>
<p>Composing my latest symphony, I mulled over which road to pursue. Should I put the spotlight on the pizzicato strings, or should I let the woodwinds play a variation of the theme? I did not know why, but my mind screamed for the former, even mapping out the melody for me. Seizing this inspiration, I quickly dotted the notes all over the virtual manuscript paper. When I played it back, the solo pizzicato strings and the previous composition as a whole seemed so beautifully weaved together coherently. This was the
Green at work.
However, there was a logical reason for the apparent coherence. The pizzicato strings, though playing seemingly very different things in light of the piece as a whole, was actually closely related to the main theme, only multiplied by a “musical transformation matrix” (or, an inversion of the melody). The cloaked logic underlying the particular inspiration was indeed analyzable and explicit. Upon observing, one could see that the symphony was not composed with pure intuition and imagination. The pizzicato strings section might sound very different and complex, but the reason why they sounded like the perfect match was because beneath the inspiration, there was a logical process. This was the Blue at work.
The rules and guides of composition are the product of logic. Actual implementation is achieved via intuition.
I believe a logical law deep-rooted in the brain would enable the brain to use it in the form of inspirations.
When the eye or ear sees a creative work of art or music, the brain analyzes it through intuition, and aims to find logical patterns within the piece. The more mathematical and complex a piece of music is, the more joy the brain receives when it tries to decipher the cryptographic collection of sounds[3]. What’s profound is that this takes place secretly, in the depths of sub-consciousness, and that anyone could do it. To the ear, what’s seemingly complex are but simple logical rules to the brain. It is through the excelling in “reducing” an extremely complex piece of music to the most basic terms that the brain finds its pleasure.</p>
<p>1 Osgood, Charles Egerton., William H. May, and Murray S. Miron. Cross-cultural Universals of Affective Meaning.
Urbana: University of Illinois, 1975. Print.
2 Lichtenfeld, Stephanie, Andrew J. Elliot, Markus A. Maier, and Reinhard Pekrun. “Fertile Green – Green Facilitates
Creative Performance.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 38.6 (2012): 784-97. Print.
3 Hudson, Nicholas J. “Musical Beauty and Information Compression: Complex to the Ear but Simple to the
Mind?” BMC Research Notes. BioMed Central, 20 Jan. 2011. Web. 05 Nov. 2013.</p>
<p>Turquoise is a color that aims to solve these mysteries. Logical analysis cannot take place without intuition. To analyze something, one must not only be intellectually curious, but also appreciate the bridge between intuition and logic. That’s what Turquoise excels in. Many of the world’s beauty can be dissolved into formulas. Where there is art, there must be mathematics.
That is what I found out through composing, through playing the piano, when the chord progressions flow ever so beautifully but observe important contrapuntal rules in music. Behind the intuition there is logic. That is what I found out when I pour out algorithms and develop software. Object-orientated programming language almost resembles real life – for example, the inheritance of a class grants you all of its methods and variables, just like inheriting genes from a father grants you his ways of talking and his facial features. Behind the logic there is intuitive thought.
Turquoise is akin to skateboarding in the crowded Venetian streets and just absorbing the scenery; it is also akin to carefully assembling 50,000 blocks of Lego bricks to form a battleship.
To me, life alternates between these concepts. I am Turquoise. I do not choose between strict logic and pure intuition. I explore the relationship between these two processes of the mind. In doing so, I realize the depth of the human mind, the profoundness, the mysterious nature. Our foundations are built by facts and rules we learnt in school, by logical reasoning and rigorous proving. Intuition naturally helps us seamlessly integrate these concepts into our daily lives, making it seem so natural. Sometimes, intuition also gives us an idea, a spark, something inspiring us. We turn them into the fuel for the logical mind, to prove our ideas carefully step by step, like how Andrew Wiles proved Fermat’s Last Theorem from seemingly unrelated fields of mathematics, a sudden spark that he went on and spent years to formalize and validate his idea.
Turquoise is the spirit of enjoying two parts of life: the free, adventurous, curious Green and the strict, logical, serious Blue. In everything I do, I do it two ways. It is living my brain to the fullest capacity.</p>
<p>Wow thank you for posting your essays Skyrior, and congratulations!
I was gonna post mine right after submission, but having seen the decision, now I want to save them till the deferral turns into something else…whatever it is.</p>
<p>Oh good lord, I thought the word count was 250, not 500.</p>
<p>Well, looks like I need to find a different dream school…</p>
<p>Decision: Accepted EA</p>
<p>Why UChicago:</p>
<p>Some people might think that the books on my bookshelf have no common thread: from “Game of Thrones” to a collection of Frida Kahlo paintings to an analysis of disease in medieval Europe, I want to read about everyone and everything. This is not evidence of a lack of focus, but rather a focus on trying to learn about the world from multiple perspectives. In college, I want to study the broad disciplines of a liberal arts education while also conducting research, something I had feared would be impossible until I learned more about UChicago. When I asked for advice from the smartest person I know, our neighbor (name removed for privacy), a microbiologist, he told me he couldn’t imagine a better place for me than his alma mater, UChicago. He told me tales of learning from Nobel laureates and being able to conduct research, even as an undergraduate. In the past five months, I have learned how invaluable mentors like these can be from my own work in sickle cell disease research. They have shown me not what to think, but how to think, question, and analyze. This is what I want out of a college education.
However, I still want a place where I can get a broad education that encompasses all of my interests–from mathematics, to history, to religion–while still focusing intensely on my passion for research. As I talked to my friend (name removed for privacy), a second-year at the College, she told me more about the Core, and the variety of classes I would be able and encouraged to take. UChicago offers the balance and intensity that I dream of in a school.
But perhaps more than anything, I am excited to study and live with the types of students who go to UChicago. People who are just as indecisively curious as I am, like the frat boys, who, according to (my friend), “want to discuss Descartian philosophy.” The more I’ve learned about UChicago, whether by reading the seemingly endless offerings of the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations department or watching videos of the Scav Hunt, I fall more in love because it is a place where cultivating a healthy Life of the Mind does not require pruning the “unnecessary” parts. Although I am curious about many things, there is one thing I know–I would love to study them at the University of Chicago.</p>
<p>I need help with my UChicago essay. I was thinking about the #4 prompt but I don’t know where to start. Please help!!!</p>
<p>I chose the “create your own” prompt for the last supplemental essay, and I was just wondering if it was too risky or edgy. It is about my view on what happens when we die, and stuff about how you are born into another living thing. I don’t know if it’s too religious (or lack thereof) for a college essay. Anyone have any opinions?</p>
<p>great first essay skyrior! how did you do the research?</p>
<p>@tegauntt I think the word count is “about 250” and the technical limit is 500, and I don’t think it would be a problem if you write something like 220 - as long as it’s effectively written. (In contrast with you, I thought there was no word limit and only found out about the 500 the day before EA deadline)</p>
<p>@patjeff45 IMO if you take the right approach it’ll be a very interesting essay to read. Whether it’s risky or not depends on your tone and structure more than content, i think.</p>
<p>Decision: Accepted EA</p>
<p>Prompt: Explain Your Favorite Joke</p>
<pre><code> Norm Macdonald told the most hilarious joke of all time. The Moth Joke was a moment of inspiration that has been unequaled since. If Dantes Divine Comedy was both written by a god and actually funny, scientists have calculated that it would only be roughly 68% as funny as the moth joke. Sadly, it was not, and so far the only thing that has even approached the moth joke in level of humor is the classic Man Slipping on a Banana Peel gag, the second-most hilarious joke of all time.
The moth joke centers around one of the eponymous insects. He visits his local podiatrists office, and the doctor asks him about what bothers him. The moth then takes us through a laundry list of psychological ailments, none of which have anything to do with his feet. In fact, it seems like the moth is going through an existential crisis as he questions his own place in society and the purpose of life. He describes his job, but is unable to remember exactly what his job entails and opines that his employer does not know either. He then implies that he has been experiencing marital problems, and that he no longer loves his wife. He reveals that his youngest child has died in last years harsh winter and that his other son only serves to remind him of his own failures. He concludes his lament with the nonsensical Doc, sometimes I feel like a spider, even though Im a moth, just barely hanging on to my own web with an everlasting fire beneath me, finally stating that hes …not feeling good. The Podiatrist becomes confused during the lament, and asks him why he came to a podiatrists office instead of going to a psychiatrist’s office. The moth coolly replies, Because the light was on.
Part of the beauty of the joke is the interplay between the simplicity of the actual punchline with the complexity of the exposition. Macdonalds joke is not a joke about a moth. Instead, its humor derives from the very nature of joke-telling itself. The long build-up plays with our expectations of what the joke will be. Thus, when the joke itself is revealed to be nothing more than a simple pun, we laugh. This is a classic example of the Shaggy-Dog story. In a shaggy-dog story, the audience is built up to expect a traditional punchline, but the anecdote instead ends abruptly with either a very weak punchline or no punchline at all. The irony in this genre of joke is not contained inside the joke, but in the audiences expectations for irony to be contained in the joke.
Another reason for the jokes appeal is in Norm Macdonalds presentation. Macdonald uses his deadpan demeanor to full effect in the joke, listing the moths many troubles with barely a waver in his voice. Even when the joke crosses the line into the surreal, such as Norms naming all of his characters with vaguely Eastern European names that he struggles to pronounce (such as the moths son, Gregaro Illinilinivich), he keeps composure and refuses to divorce himself from his typical monotone.
</code></pre>
<p>Even when the joke turns dark, as the moth contemplates suicide, Macdonald still elicits laughter from the audience. This type of laughter has been studied, published in a peer-reviewed publication, and codified into the important-sounding Misattribution Theory of Humor. The theory, proposed by Zillmann & Bryant in a 1980 paper, shows that people will laugh at things that are not considered funny by themselves. The viewer will attribute their laughter to the way that something is said, rather than its content. This explains why Macdonald can get laughs with grisly subject matter. He presents the dark subject matter very nonchalantly, and this is seen as funny.</p>
<pre><code> As comedy historians (if such a job exists in the future) look back at the comedy of the turn of the century, Norm Macdonalds joke is unlikely to warrant much pause. It is, in effect, a man telling a lame joke about moths propensity towards light wrapped up in four minutes of pointless exposition. However, through his mastery of pace and intonation coupled with his awareness of audience expectations, Macdonald crafts a transcendent piece of humor that still manages to fly under the radar of notability.
</code></pre>
<p>Accepted EA 
Prompt: Mantis Shrimp (and yes this is autobiographical, despite being in the second person xD)</p>
<p>The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis</p>
<p>Swathed in the macabre shadows of dusk, in that instant your neighbors are a mosque with a lone, gangling ivory tower and the endless expanse of a continent half-obscured by candy floss clouds sentineling the horizon. The air is faintly redolent of cold steel and smoke. A something-watt compact fluorescent light bulb coughs beside you. Had you been closely watching its flickering, you would have thought youd been gazing at a silent film in a deserted drive-in.</p>
<p>Some words are elusive by nature, defying easy translation. After all, Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon the absolute truth.</p>
<p>As you stand there, solitary and unwavering, you think back to the journey that brought you miles beyond the last bus stop in Europe, that bestowed upon you the uncompromising glare of the oldest and poorest continent on Earth. Braving a grueling six thousand mile flight only to be greeted by an ungrateful, tempestuous destination, youd mumbled a tacitly received excuse to your heavy-eyed team. The storm had brewed menacingly above you as you escaped from the confines of Gibraltar International Airport; but you had shielded your head from the rain with your lantern and dowdily kept your eyes glued to the ground, thankful that there were far too many tourists for any pochemuchka [1] to stop you and ask what a fifteen-year-old Indian-American girl might be doing wandering the streets of Gibraltar unaccompanied.</p>
<p>As you had passed the cemetery in Trafalgar where British soldiers lay buried, less a bastion of honor than a flimsy afterthought, you regarded sadly the inviolable chain-link fences bounding all that the English military still owned. Continuing down Europa Road, youd come across street vendors peddling Egyptian rugs in front of Georgian-style synagogues, beggars waving their weathered coffee cans at duchesses clad in emeralds, a stately building donning a mansard roof tarnished by sfumato memos scrawled upon the walls in languages long since indecipherable. Cultural flux had stalked you at every corner; not even when youd stopped at an Indian restaurant and sunk your crooked teeth into a samosa could you shake off a visceral sense of dépaysement [2].</p>
<p>Objects, on the other hand, survive and endure as intricate layers of bone and damp silt, ossified anthologies of events past interposed by the palpable intuition of things still happening, and of things yet to occur.</p>
<p>One hour and twenty-three minutes later, you finally arrive at the point where the gently rolling waves of the Strait meet the desolate shores. Europa Point is where you capture your first glimpse of Africa, and though you and she are separated by only nine miles of still black water, you revel in the security this meager distance offers. Because all of a sudden, your thoughts become as turbulent as the gale encircling you, your mind drenched with unease, a dread of the unknown, a carnal fear of Africa. You shudder involuntarily as you contemplate the journey ahead of you: ten days in Nyala, Sudan, among bloodthirsty warlords and broken refugees, killer diseases, and the worst road collision statistics in the world, as you struggle to communicate with officials and aid civilians raped possibly beyond rehabilitation, the first by bribery and fraud and the latter by twisted, hardened men and you cant speak Arabic, nor Swahili, nor Dinka. The pale mångata [3] seems to highlight a tenuous path across the strait, mirroring your trembling. Try as you might, you cant shake the images of a dark continent, the grave of the Western world.</p>
<p>Such is the dilemma of a planet denominated fractured even by language: in our voracious lust for expression and desperation to decipher the world around us, we lose ourselves in our own pretentions our perceived need to immortalize thought at the risk of compromising reality, of alienating those who know of and speak from an incongruent experience. But what if you hadnt focused on the Western drivel declassing of Africa in a fit of obstinate modern-day imperialism?</p>
<p>The mantis shrimp demolishes everything in its wake, and yet in its triumph embraces the ephemerality of it all. Immanuel Kant once theorized that those with a taste for the splendid sublime, a primal awe pervaded with beauty, are also those of a choleric temperament, and the shrimp certainly conforms. If you had had their eyes as you stood upon Europa Point, how would you have recalled that moment?</p>
<p>One hour and twenty-three minutes later, you finally arrive at the point where the gently rolling waves of the Strait kiss the auburn shoreline and dissolve. The depths and hues of the night eclipse your form. Europa Point is where you capture your first glimpse of Africa, the greatest reaches of the chestnut and umber Jebel Musa concealed by a capricious grey mist that dissociates into silver, granite, even faint lavenders. The Strait of Gibraltar ripples languidly, the full moon casting a thin, snow-white glow upon the surface of the violet fluorescent waters, each wavelet replicating and magnifying its light. The myopic monochrome of the night is supplanted by a continuum of deep indigos and midnight blues, with a faint streak of aubergine moving like a delicate firefly, looping and winding and twisting across the skies.</p>
<p>Mere words strain to solidify an entropically trending world; they teach you the dissonance of sincerity and little else. The purest forms of transmitting the human experience exist in more malleable forms.</p>
<p>Seven thousand languages, over a thousand generations. All of which wither so quickly in the face of sixteen cones.</p>
<p>Untranslatable Words:
<p>ultrachromatic Omg what did I just read lol</p>
<p>@ultrachromatic: I have no words for the essay you wrote. All I can manage to say at this point (I still haven’t recovered) is that essay has to be the most ridiculously ethereal college essay I have ever read. Seriously, how high did you have to get to write something of that sort?</p>
<p>^ LOL
Like, Ken Kesey writing “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” high.</p>
<p>@ultrachromatic damn. props, girl.</p>
<p>@ironchariot aw thanks! <3 i really hope you hear some good news from uchicago in a couple months, i’d be honored to meet you :’)</p>
<p>Woah. @ultrachromatic that was seriously amazing. You remind me a bit of Nabokov (my favorite writer.) Thanks for posting, that was so much fun to read! Your essay just made me want UChicago that much more, and that’s saying something :)</p>
<p>Aw @EnoughNerve You’re so sweet! <3 And Nabokov’s one of my favorite authors too - it’s so nice finding someone else who appreciates him! (Have you by any chance read his poetry collection?)</p>
<p>Best of luck with UChicago! I really hope to see you next year ^__^</p>
<p>COMMON APP: Describe a place or environment where you are perfectly content. What do you do or experience there, and why is it meaningful to you?</p>
<p>Streams of water course down my back. The pitter-patter of water droplets hitting the floor is drowned out by the sound of my voice booming Ray Charles. I wallow in the warm water as it washes away my filth and worries. The curtains, closed, seclude me in a world only known to me–hidden once the water ceases to pour and the curtains ring as they are pulled open.</p>
<p>Every night I step into the shower and close the curtains, I open a portal into my own personal Narnia. I let my imagination fly loose and my thoughts bounce off the tiles. With my trusty loofah, I trek the world, fighting off monsters and rescuing damsels in distress, discovering my most profound ideas along the way. Albert Einstein believed that imagination was more important than knowledge; for knowledge is everything we know now and imagination is everything we will ever know in the future. The way I see it is that there are two worlds: The realm of imagination in the shower and the realm of knowledge outside.</p>
<p>I grab a towel and begin to dry myself off–patting and running it over my skin. My feet take the first steps onto the rug and leave the shower. I take my towel and carve an opening through the steamy window. As I stare into the mirror at my reflection, I ruminate about the thoughts I had brought along with me.</p>
<p>I think what Albert Einstein was trying to say was that everything that will ever exist in our world already exists in the shower. We just have to find it. Our ancient ancestors had the resources to create the light bulb or the steam engine, but they didn’t have the imagination to put it together, not yet. That is what gives my shower its meaningful existence. I can find “The Next Big Thing” amidst the soaps and steam.</p>
<p>Burdened with the day’s frustrations, I turn the spigot and listen to the shower head begin to hiss and spurt water. I run my hand underneath its streams until the temperature is just right. My feet take the first steps into the shower and leave this world. I close the curtains and prepare myself, for I am off on another adventure.</p>