Read My Supplement Essay Please!

iloveumich
Tue, 31 Jan 2012 08:59:48 +0000

Most important - the question asks you to address any unique aspects of the specific program/school you’re interested in. Your essay does not mention either; to be frank, including cliches like “Remember this Anthony, while everyone is shooting for the moon, shoot for the stars. That is how you change the world” seems generic and doesn’t actually support your arguments at all. You would do well to mention something specific. WHY can the University help you achieve your goals? Is it because of the great professors who go out of their way to provide students with unique learning opportunities (which you would have to explain)? Why do you think that your degree from UM will help you change the world - do you want to use it to develop some specific computer program, to help you move onto grad school, or what? The reason they ask this question is because they want to see their applicants are actually invested in the school and have done some research, and yours doesn’t show that. Find out as much as you can about the CS program, the teachers, the internships, the job opportunities, the career placement, perspectives from former students. Then you will actually have the material to compose an essay, which unfortunately you don’t yet have.
I don’t understand the whole thing about your cousin Tim and I doubt the admissions reader at UM would either. Did you meet him at the funeral? Was he close to your grandfather? Why would his perspective on the situation be meaningful to you? You need to either drop the whole thing about Tim or give some background to it - otherwise, it makes no sense and confuses the reader.
Grammar, punctuation, spelling, mechanics, diction:
-“And surly it did” - sentence fragment. Surely is misspelled.
-“Only for a short period, but a period I wont ever forget. Tim was a man of great accomplishments” - sentence fragment.
-“He embarked through every continent of the world.” You can’t use ‘embarked’ here, because it’s a transitive verb. What you’d need to say is “he embarked upon journeys that took him to every continent” or something like that.
-“I know the College of Literature, Science and the Arts will better my future goals because it will allow me to focus on Computer Science as well as focus on many Entrepreneurial ventures.” Come on, think about this. You don’t “better” a goal, do you? That doesn’t make any sense. You work toward a goal, or you better yourself, or you try to set better goals - any of those makes sense - but you simply can’t “better [your] goals”. That sentence is meaningless.
-“As a young adult, I strive off the idea that I have been introduced to two fields which correlate together greatly.” Also a problem - you don’t “strive off” of something. Idiomatically, you strive FOR or TOWARDS something. I think you don’t quite understand what the word strive means, because its use here is incorrect and doesn’t make sense. Also, things don’t “correlate together greatly”; that part is simply illogical. Either things correlate, or they don’t. What you mean, I think, is that you are drawn to the idea that two fields can be used together, but altogether, I would throw this sentence out - there are waaay too many problems with it and it’s not worth fixing.


Either way I think you’ve got quite a lot of work to do on this essay, especially since you’ve left it until one day before the application deadline. You might want to think about overhauling it and just writing a new essay. Good luck.