Zach Blackburn
Member
- Joined
- Dec 25, 2018
- Messages
- 25
While everyone waits for the final appointments to come out, me among them, I thought it ripe to share a little insight into my application that could possibly account for a long wait on an appointment, and also hopefully make some of the others also waiting with me chuckle a little bit. So, everyone has the typical essay they fill out, which I did of course, but compared to other college essays this one was straight forward, I took little risks like one may with a typical college essay, it just didn't seem like the time or place to tell jokes or funny stories that you might see on other top college essays, most known by the "risk factor" so I played it relatively safe. It seemed perfectly adequate to not drop any jokes in the essay regarding career goals and integrity.
One may question, why is this candidate so keen on telling jokes? Well, when it came down to my Letters of Recommendation, from both English and Math, as well as the additional 3 that you can add to your application, nearly every one of them mentioned my humor in some form. So how was I gonna fit this somewhere in my application?
Enter the "unique life experience" box. While some candidates use this to tell about how they endure harsh conditions, often working while also completing high tier classes on top of a sport, I had none of those, but I did have one unique life experience, that I could almost guarantee no other candidate would even consider putting on their application.
Here I took the aforementioned "risk factor", I've read on this website that it is advised to put at least something down in this box, whether they count it as "unique" or not is up to their discretion, I saw an opportunity and took it. What I put was something along the lines of "I ran a video game server for a large sum of peers for my high school, which taught me necessary skills in both Leadership, in addition to Networking (the career field I'd like to choose)". Once again, this could easily be called one of the stupidest things to put on the application to a military academy of all places, but on the flipside, who in admissions has ever heard of someone doing such an absurd life experience? I took this into account, will it make my application memorable? Probably, but in a good way? Only time will tell...
Feel free to laugh at my choice, call it genius, call it stupid, but can anyone tell me of another candidate that has done this? I think not...In reality, I'm sure the unique life experience won't be a huge dealbreaker for my application, but I thought I'd give a story to those who check these forums to ease their minds as their frantically refresh their portal, like me.
One may question, why is this candidate so keen on telling jokes? Well, when it came down to my Letters of Recommendation, from both English and Math, as well as the additional 3 that you can add to your application, nearly every one of them mentioned my humor in some form. So how was I gonna fit this somewhere in my application?
Enter the "unique life experience" box. While some candidates use this to tell about how they endure harsh conditions, often working while also completing high tier classes on top of a sport, I had none of those, but I did have one unique life experience, that I could almost guarantee no other candidate would even consider putting on their application.
Here I took the aforementioned "risk factor", I've read on this website that it is advised to put at least something down in this box, whether they count it as "unique" or not is up to their discretion, I saw an opportunity and took it. What I put was something along the lines of "I ran a video game server for a large sum of peers for my high school, which taught me necessary skills in both Leadership, in addition to Networking (the career field I'd like to choose)". Once again, this could easily be called one of the stupidest things to put on the application to a military academy of all places, but on the flipside, who in admissions has ever heard of someone doing such an absurd life experience? I took this into account, will it make my application memorable? Probably, but in a good way? Only time will tell...
Feel free to laugh at my choice, call it genius, call it stupid, but can anyone tell me of another candidate that has done this? I think not...In reality, I'm sure the unique life experience won't be a huge dealbreaker for my application, but I thought I'd give a story to those who check these forums to ease their minds as their frantically refresh their portal, like me.