The Weird Ways Of College Essays

WASHINGTON - "Can a toad hear? Prove it."

"Name something with extraterrestrial origins. Offer a thorough defense of your hypothesis."

"Write a story that begins, `Many years later, he remembered his first experience with ice,' and includes references to: a new pair of socks, a historical landmark, a spork (a spoon/fork), a domesticated animal and the complete works of William Shakespeare."

There was a time when college application questions were dull as tapioca and just as predictable. You jotted down "a little about yourself in 250 words" and that was it.

No more. As the authentic examples above suggest, colleges are jazzing up their essay questions to plumb and stretch students' psyches. In some cases, admissions offices say they want their questions to attract applicants by signaling a hip attitude toward intellectual life. Other times, the strange questions help identify the best writers and thinkers - or, at a minimum, keep their admissions staffs from falling out of their chairs in boredom from reading huge piles of junk.

In the process, some students - and their parents - have been left reeling.

Liz Carr's ordeal began when she brought home a University of Virginia application this fall and showed it to her parents. The requested grades and test scores didn't give them much angst: Liz, a senior at Oakton High School in Vienna, Va., has high GPA and SAT numbers. But when the Carrs looked at the essay topics, collective family heartburn set in.

The question that turned their lives upside down for the last two months consisted of a single sentence: "What is your favorite word, and why?"

"It's my idea of a nightmare," said Maryann Carr, who spent weeks agonizing over it with her daughter. "Even at 40 years old, there isn't one word that identifies the spark of my life. How are kids going to answer that?"

Some colleges say the new line of questions serve as a subtle marketing tool to get out the message that their school is cool, alternative or whatever. "Remember that this is Chicago," prompts one essay question on the University of Chicago's current application, "so it is better to err on the side of intellectual pretension than on the side of pure silliness."

University of Virginia admissions officers hope a question they added this year about discrimination will even suggest to applicants that the Charlottesville school is minority-friendly despite having done away with a point system that used to help minorities when applying.

Virginia's questions are tame, though, compared with what some other colleges are asking.

Take the University of Chicago, the "Saturday Night Live" of the college application world. This year, applicants were asked to write a proposal for a television pilot, incorporating some of these: a German opera, Enrico Fermi's personal trainer, van Gogh's severed ear, Bill Nye the Science Guy and an evil clown.

Although supporters contend that off-the-wall essays offer important insight into how a person thinks, not everyone is convinced. Some schools that tried them have now reversed themselves, while others are moving toward a common application - one form, with boilerplate questions, accepted by several schools - to simplify matters.

But Ted O'Neill, Chicago's dean of admissions, says unusual essay questions spur interesting results. Even though students may choose a more mundane subject, one-third opt for the odd and improvisational, O'Neill said.

"Some students want to exercise their imagination. This gives them permission," says O'Neill, who adds that the questions reflect that the school is an intellectual place that also has a sense of humor.

Julia Reischel got the message. The D.C. senior wasn't even planning to apply to Chicago before the night in September when she pulled up its application on her computer. Then, between fits of laughter, she read the TV pilot question, and suddenly Chicago became her first choice. Any school posing questions that fun, she reasoned, would welcome her off-center view of the world.

Reischel's Harvard University application essay on a significant life experience took two months to finish; her Chicago piece took two hours and turned out far better, she thinks.

"I felt like it got at who I am," said the Georgetown Day School student. "You were being asked something that makes you think."

Johns Hopkins University asks students to write about a problem-solving creation that uses a piece of wire, a Hopkins car sticker, an egg carton and an inexpensive hardware item. American University poses: "Imagine you are the editor of a major national news magazine. Write the cover story . . . for the issue (of) Jan. 1, 2010." Vermont's Bennington College, as befits its alternative personality, asks the can-toads-hear question.

Richard Fuller, dean of admissions at Hamilton College, said the Upstate New York school reacted partly in response to the proliferation of Internet sites where students can buy "answers" to old-chestnut essay questions. Hamilton's solution: "If you were reduced to living on a flat plane, what would be your greatest problems? Opportunities?"

The University of Pennsylvania helped launch the quirky-question movement in the late 1980s with this one: "You have just completed your 300-page autobiography. Please submit Page 217." The topic proved such a humdinger that the school still uses it, and about 70 percent of applicants tackle it each year.

"You want (the question) to be challenging and inventive without being too oblique," said Dean of Admissions Lee Stetson. "You don't want to deviate too far . . . and be a negative reflection on the university."

But that's exactly what some critics contend colleges are doing. Admissions work, they say, is about selecting the right student, not about being entertained, and they question the relevance of bizarre topics.

Amherst College, for one, has reconsidered. Four years ago, the Massachusetts school posed a topic that's destined for the Weird Essay Question Hall of Fame: "Sartre said, `Hell is other people'; but Streisand sang, `People who need people/Are the luckiest people in the world.' With whom do you agree and why? Don't be icky."

That's right - Sartre, Streisand and icky, all in one.

After two years, Amherst ditched the question. The responses were too maudlin and trite, said Director of Admissions Katie Fretwell, and some faculty members didn't feel that mixing existentialism with "Funny Girl" was helping the school's image.

Fretwell also worries that oddball questions only increase the pressure on already stressed-out 17-year-olds who may feel that there's a "right" answer. "They may be the first in their family to apply to Amherst, or (any) college, and to pose a question unlike any question they've ever encountered . . . could scare them off."

But the biggest drawback, said Sarah Myers McGinty, author of the book "The College Application Essay," may have to do with perception. Many applicants and parents already think the admissions process is totally random, she said. Questions about living in a two-dimensional world could fuel such thoughts, she worries.

Some universities have found out, as Amherst did, that clever questions don't necessarily lead to impressive responses.

Penn's Stetson remembers a call his office got several years ago. An applicant's father wanted to know if his son could have more time to submit his application. His son, he said, hadn't finished writing his 300-page autobiography and didn't know what was on Page 217 yet.

He didn't get in. -------------------------------

Here are some sample essay questions from the applications to two universities:

University of Chicago

1999-2000 application essay question:

The late-18th-century popular philosopher and cultural critic Georg Lichtenberg wrote, "Just as we outgrow a pair of trousers, we outgrow acquaintances, libraries, principles, etc., at times before they've worn out and at times - and this is the worst of all - before we have new ones." Write an essay about something you have outgrown, perhaps before you had a replacement - a friend, a political philosophy, a favorite author, or anything that has had an influence on you. What, if anything, has taken its place?

1999-2000 application essay question:

Having observed the recent success of television shows about young people, the University of Chicago has decided to pitch a pilot proposal to the networks. . . . In the tradition of the University of Chicago school of improvisation and its offshoot, the Second City comedy troupe, help us out by creating a story for your proposal. Remember that this is Chicago, so it is better to err on the side of intellectual pretension than on the side of pure silliness. Please bear in mind that "Felicity" has already been done. The setting is near a grand college campus - green, leafy and gothic - in a major Midwestern city. Incorporate into your story:

1) A genre from the following:

a. A German opera

b. a soap opera

c. "Real World"

d. "Bill Nye the Science Guy"

e. . . . OK . . . "Friends"

2) A character from the following:

a. Godot

b. Enrico Fermi's personal trainer

c. a starving investment banker

d. an evil clown

3) A prominent prop from the following:

a. Cliff Notes for "Finnegans Wake"

b. van Gogh's ear

c. a proton accelerator

d. Muddy Waters' guitar

Keep your proposal to two or three pages. We know that Aristotle is out of fashion, but including a beginning, middle and end might help you structure the story.

1997-98 application essay question:

Elvis is alive! OK, maybe not, but here in the Office of College Admissions we are persuaded that current Elvis sightings in highway rest areas, grocery stores and Laundromats are part of a wider conspiracy involving five of the following: the metric system, the Mall of America, the crash of the Hindenburg, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, lint, J.D. Salinger and wax fruit. Help us get to the bottom of this evil plot by constructing your own theory of how and why five of these items and events are related. Your narrative may take any form you like, but try to keep your theory to under two pages.

University of Virginia

1999-2000 application essay question:

Answer one of the following. Limit your response to a half page.

a. Make a bold prediction about something in the year 2020 that no one else has made a bold prediction about.

b. If you could cause any one living person to change his or her mind about one thing, whom would you pick, and how would you change his or her thinking?

c. "The past isn't dead. It's not even past." So says the lawyer Gavin Stevens near the end of Faulkner's "Requiem for a Nun." To borrow Stevens' words, what small event, either from your personal history or the history of the world, is neither "dead" nor "past"?

d. Does discrimination still exist? What single experience or event has led you to your conclusion?

e. What is your favorite word, and why? - The Washington Pos.