<p>Why are are the princeton supplement essay topics difficult? Some schools, like Rice, ask straight out what unique perspectives you can contribute. Princeton seems to want to make the applicants find clever ways to work irrelavant material into the essay. But maybe I misunderstood the reasons for the topics.</p>
<p>Difficult? Broad and unspecific, perhaps, but I don’t see how they’re incredibly difficult. They want insight into you as a person, the way you think, and clearly each of the possible questions asks for you to demonstrate that in any way you can. They’re less straightforward, I admit, but at least you have a lot more flexibility in the way you can answer them.</p>
<p>Challenging questions weed out the faint of heart.</p>
<p>My year, I didn’t have to write another essay for Princeton because there was an “analyze a quote” option which meant I just had to find a quote that fit one of my essays.</p>
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Sure, but that was back when the essay topics were easier. Now they’re more difficult. This current prompt, for example, is much more difficult:
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<p>Last year, I looked at the essay topics and knew exactly which one I didn’t want to write. There was no way I was going to even touch the prompt with the Rainer Maria Rilke quote about questions and stones (can’t seem to find it offhand); it was way too obscure for me, and I really didn’t feel that cracking a prompt inspired by a poem was a viable option.</p>
<p>Well, January 1st rolls around, and I don’t have a clue what I’m going to do for this essay. It’s the only one I haven’t finished. I’ve run into enormous dead ends with the other options: I don’t read a whole lot, so nothing was jumping out at me about the rather generic fourth topic that I had thought was most promising. I look back over all three viable topics (My CommonApp essay was the significant person option), considering every possibility, when something clicked. I was reading that poem the wrong way, and by the wrong way, I mean overanalyzing it, searching for some golden meaning obscured by Rilke’s language. But when I finally allowed myself to experience the lines rather than stare at them and wait for them to crack, I found the inspiration for my essay almost instantly. In retrospect, it turned out to my best application essay by far, even though I had only an hour or so to edit it. I had to leave my quantitative comfort zone to come up with that essay, and I was extremely pleased with it. </p>
<p>With these topics, Princeton wants to push you to think, because this kind of thinking is necessary to survival at Princeton. The prompts may not demand as much creativity as the ones from UChicago, for example, but they require more thought than Harvard’s write-about-whatever-you-want essay. Princeton wants to admit people, not statistics, so they want to see your experiences and your reflections upon them. These prompts are designed to make you slightly uncomfortable, to present an intellectual challenge that can lead to a worthwhile experience.</p>
<p>Actually, the broad nature of the question makes it easier to answer because you can take it in any direction. Remember, the admissions officers recognize that you are still a teenager and are not necessarily expecting earth-shattering observations. Obviously, this essay may be easier to write if you have already lived through a momentous event, but everyone has experiences that shape them. If you have a favorite book, you probably already know a quote from it that moves you. If it moves you, it is usually because it is something you relate to–that’s what you want to write about. If you want an example, look at the current issue of Princeton Magazine online–the cover story is about Princeton professor Joyce Carol Oates and the influence Alice in Wonderland had on her writing and career.</p>