Would you give it a chance?

unalove
Sat, 16 Jun 2007 10:07:57 +0000

If I were you, I would confine my “this is the school for me” plea to the “Why Chicago” question. You want to give a narrative to your grades, sure, but you also want to show that you’re over it now and that you love working and academia (your AD involvement helps spell that out-- make sure it’s clear on your application what exactly you did-- use the extra space thing if you need to).

Chicago is also known for making very surprising decisions. From what I’ve seen, they would prefer somebody with a colored past who obviously has potential to do better and a love for the topic at hand that will carry them through the core than somebody who has sailed through high school but hasn’t demonstrated initiative independent of what the school has offered.

This is my way to explain why I have friends who are attending Columbia and Yale right now who did not get into Chicago, and I have friends who were rejected at almost every other “top” school and were accepted at Chicago: my Columbia and Yale friends performed excellently in school, my Chicago friends didn’t, and, come to think of it, neither did I relative to my cohorts. What’s important, when it comes down to it, is how you approach learning, how you connect ideas, and whether you’re going to not like the academic experience here for being stuffy and intense or whether you are going to embrace it even if you don’t completely understand what you’re learning.