Swarthmore Discovery Weekend Essays

Colleges & Universities Swarthmore College
1

<p>The application form asks for two short essays. How short exactly is a short essay? Both of mine are about 500 words, and I’m worried that they may be too long.</p>

<p>Thanks!</p>

2

<p>More specifically my essays are 480 and 540 words.</p>

3

<p>Those should be fine.</p>

4

<p>Mine were 500 words too!</p>

5

<p>Hope we both get in ^^.</p>

6

<p>Now I’m really worried. I was just going to send in my Swat Weekend application when I read your post. One of my essays is 800 words and the other is 600. At the time, I thought they were rather short by my standard and by my school’s standard. I’m going to shorten both of them. ty</p>

<p>My first post!!</p>

7

<p>Looking back at the invitation letter it said “On a separate sheet, write 2 short essays.” Now, they don’t mean write both essays on ONE sheet, right? LoL…</p>

8

<p>wish I had seen this earlier… both of my essays were over 600 words. oops.</p>

9

<p>I wouldn’t worry about it. If they really wanted to hold you to particular length, they would (or should) have given you a target word count. That’s not really what they are looking for from these essays. More likely, they are just trying to get a sense of you or your personality or whatever.</p>

10

<p>What is a Discovery Weekend Essay? Better yet, what is a Swarthmore Discovery Weekend?</p>

11

<p>Look it up on Google.</p>

12

<p>uhoh.
mine is a page and a half each</p>

<p>oh well. short is short.</p>

13

<p>Discovery Weekend is Swarthmore’s diversity recruiting campus visit event.</p>

<p>[Students</a> invited to campus for Discovery Weekend - The Phoenix](<a href=“http://www.swarthmorephoenix.com/2007/09/27/news/students-invited-to-campus-for-discovery-weekend]Students”>http://www.swarthmorephoenix.com/2007/09/27/news/students-invited-to-campus-for-discovery-weekend)</p>

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<p>Diversity is one of the defining characteristics of Swarthmore College. 42% of Swarthmore’s students are US minority students or internationals. More than half of the acceptance letters each year are sent to non-white or non-US students.</p>

14

<p>LoL, I emailed them a while ago and then the reply was this:</p>

<p>“Short essays should be at most a page.”</p>

<p>Never specified if I was to fit both on one page or one essay per page. Oh well, I sent mine already before getting it. </p>

<p>No use worrying now ^_^.</p>

<p>I’m sure the word count won’t be held against us since the wording was very vague. I do wonder though how much the essay is weighed in their selection process (which apparently includes the generic stuff: rank, GPA, standardized testing, ec list).</p>

15

<p>They accepted 130 out of 360 applications to attend Discovery Weekend last fall. I’m guessing that the essays probably play a role in the selection. By and large, students aren’t going to apply for Discovery Weekend at Swarthmore if they aren’t pretty solid academically.</p>

16

<p>what did people write about for the essay topics?</p>

17

<p>whatever the questions asked. i tried to make them interesting but it was kind of limited. what’d you write about?</p>

18

<p>when do we find out???</p>

19

<p>Is the application deadline over for Discovery Weekend?</p>

20

<p>The deadline should be over, since the Admissions counselors have been in meetings about DW these past few days, going over apps. But I could be wrong…</p>