Michele Hernandez suggested that almost all admissions essays were weak, cliche-ridden, and "not worth reading". The staff gets thousands of essays and have to wade through most of them. When she worked as an admissions director at Dartmouth, she noticed that most essays were only read for three minutes. Some too-common essay types were the "outward bound" essay about how a person discovered their inner grit while hiking tough mountains, or the "community service" essay about how a student discovered, while working among disadvantaged peoples, that "all persons were the same". Admissions officers seek to learn how a person thinks, what kind of person they are, and their level of intellectual promise. Essays are generally important only in borderline cases.
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