“Womp womp” moments in college admissions
Often when people think of admissions officers, they envision a grumpy old man with a red pen, ruthlessly slashing through admissions files with one goal…
Last December I made a list of approximately a couple dozen colleges or so that I might like to visit. Most of the schools were recommended by my parents or siblings and some I randomly picked out of a college guidebook that seemed to embody some of the qualities I was looking for in a school. Little did I know that when my mom whispered to my brother what school she thought I would love the most, she said Tufts University, and boy was she right on that one.
I visited Tufts last year during the massive snowstorm that swept across much of the New England region. Being from Seattle, a place where two inches of snow closes down the streets and schools, this was all new territory. In truth, the snow was the easy part; I had mixed emotions because the Seahawks had just (literally) thrown away the Super Bowl to the Patriots. So entering Patriots and Brady country was not high on my agenda, but fate had other plans. After a canceled flight and many hours sitting on a tarmac, I found my way to Tufts and started to fall in love.
We arrived early for our tour and info session, so we had time to stop at the dining hall where I watched students dressed in everything from ski suits to pajamas eat, mess around, and do homework together. The students oozed happiness, curiosity, independence, and quirkiness. Later on our tour, I noticed this vibe wasn’t just radiating from the dining hall, but from the entire campus. The professors encouraged their students to pursue their passions in new and original ways. And the students were totally into long-standing traditions (I was getting hooked).
As I would later describe in my ‘Why Tufts?’ essay, I found the engineering school was more verb than noun with their hands-on, innovative style of learning. I was awed by the beauty of the campus and the values that Tufts embodies. I didn’t have a dream school, or even a concept of a dream school in my head prior to this day, but by the end of that day, I knew I had found a new home.
I felt settled because I wouldn’t have to start writing my college essays for about six months and had kept a spreadsheet of every school I visited with info regarding anything from the campus vibe to academics and everything in between. While I thought this would essentially write my essays for me, it did not (sadly). My first drafts for my Tufts supplements were quickly vetoed by both my college counselor and my mom, and while this offended me at first, looking back at it now, the essays weren’t all that great. To be honest, I think my college counselor was extremely gracious when she sent me back to the drawing board.
So now I was once again faced with the task to figure out a way to describe my love for Tufts, explain how living in Seattle has shaped my life, and somehow find a fresh way to show my nerdy side. The Admissions Officer for my region would be reading hundreds of essays and applications, and mine had to “make me jump off the page.” With this in mind (and a vertical of only a few inches) I read more blog posts (like this one) in hopes of finding some inspiration for a new essay. I loved this school, so why couldn’t I put that into a 100-word essay? I thought back to my visit and the interactions I witnessed between professors and students and the candor and passion that the women in engineering panel had shared, and before I knew it, the first two supplements were rewritten and marked done. However, the third one continued to elude me. Eventually after meeting with a teacher regarding a recent presentation, she mentioned how I began to speak too quickly when I was excited, and that’s when it hit me. A run-of-the-mill essay where I stated how I love computer science and gender studies wouldn’t get me noticed, so instead, I wrote a humorous and truthful essay about how my parents tell me to bring it down to “Mach 1” when I speak too quickly about my passions, and it worked.
Falling in love with Tufts is the easy part, but putting that into three short supplements is a task that none of us want to do. If you’re in the same place that I was this past fall, I would encourage you to let Tufts help you by reading the blog posts, think out-of-the-box, and talk to someone that knows your quirks well—who knows, you may just strike some gold and land spot-on target with your next essay.
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