…(700 characters max)
Really? 700 characters? 700 measly characters? Your damn question is 579 characters! What the hell is this? A challenge to describe and discuss diversity in 5 tweets or less?
Regards diversity as an important factor my ass.
Tell us, in 700 words, why you’re a special little snowflake and will make the student body–and thereby Stanford–more interesting.
Then, in about four years, tell me in 700 seconds or less why you’re such a special little snowflake and why I should hire you.
Then, in 700 moments or less summarize the project you’ve been working on all year and help me decide whether I should keep funding your department or restructure your priorities.
A while later, you’ll have 700 beats to hold my attention while you convince me to take the company in a different direction.
At some point, you’ll be responsible for a division of the company and will need to make innumerable decisions–and will face a host of employees who need your attention in order to transform your plans and ideas into reality. One of them, responsible for developing a crucial aspect of your overall strategy, will need to convey to you the status, direction, outlook, problems, goals, and ideas as developed by her fifteen-person team. Because you have seven similar appointments that day and seven other objectives to accomplish before you can go home, you can afford to give her just 700 seconds–a little over ten minutes–to provide you with enough information to base a series of decisions on.
Then you go home and have pie.
I would have been grateful for that kind of limitation on my college application’s “personal statement”.
And I suspect the admissions people are now much less tempted to rip their eyes out after reading a few hundred of these self-serving tripefests.
“I am not a bum; I’m a jerk. I once had wealth, power, and the love of a beautiful woman. Now I only have two things: my friends, and, uh, my thermos. Huh? My story? Okay. It was never easy for me. I was born a poor black child. I remember the days, sittin’ on the porch with my family, singin’ and dancin’ down in Mississippi…”
Navin? Is that you?!
Although I hate the term, I believe this is the definition of “First World Problems.”
Lord knows I’m not Ivy League material, but it took about 10 seconds to search Stanford’s website.
Maybe the OP needs to go to school someplace where 700 = 4800 for sufficiently large values of 700.
One of the most important skills you can learn is to write concisely. I write grants. A couple of months ago I had a grant for thousands of dollars that allowed 5,000 words to make the pitch. After I worked feverishly all week to complete my masterpiece, I learned that the directions actually allowed 5,000 characters. I had to hack that poor thing to one tenth of its original size, but I did get the grant (my first grant ever, in fact.) In your professional life you may find you have an incredibly short amount of time or space to communicate important and complex ideas. Learn to do this well, and you will succeed.
Curse on you! That’s an application for Cal, not Stanford.
It’s actually pretty confusing.
The really confusing thing is that the quote in the OP only occurs in a single post on a different message board. I’m pretty sure someone made it up just to be angry about it.
Well, I thought the OP was going to Pit Stanford for blatantly soliciting applicants to list their race as part of their admissions packet. I thought those days were long gone.
But the part about 700 “characters” is very odd. 700 words, maybe. But I’ve never seen an essay like this limited by characters. I’m finding myself not believing it.
Here is the page from Stanford’s website listing the essay requirements for freshmen applicants. The three essay questions required by Stanford (in addition to the ones from the Common App) require at least 250 words.
BTW, kids today have it so much easier with this online common app thing. In my day we had to do separate applications for each school and we had to either hand-write the damned things or use an actual typewriter.
You had it easy. I had to chisel my application on stone tablets!
“He’s just zis guy, you know?”
You had chisels? Luxury! I had to scratch my applications on the side of a mammoth with my fingernail.
I had to paint my application onto the wall of the university cave, in the still-wet blood of a mammoth. And we liked it!
ETA: Damn you, silenus!
Postage for my applications cost more than tuition!
Background: This is for a Ph.D application, not undergraduate. I’m expecting to realistically be competing against a hundred people, not 10’s of thousands.
It is in fact 700 characters. You can look for yourself on page 10 of their Ph.D App.
I’m 29, quite a bit older than the average applicant. I grew up poor, went to a top university, dropped out, but got back up and finished. I’ve had a strange career path with internships, jobs and consulting positions in a university, 3 hospitals, no less than 10 biotechnology firms and even a U.S Air Force base. I’ve made good money, but learned it wasn’t what drove me. I gave away all my things and I’ve been lucky enough to travel the world with my life stuffed in nothing but a 35 pound backpack. I could write just this tiny blurb, but I like to think that I actually have something to say that isn’t the same old trite crap.
(yes, I am considering changing my answer to a cleaned up version of this).
Rhythmdvl
Your point is masterfully made. I applaud you.
You had the luxury of me having had to invent language for you!
I’m very surprised this is part of a graduate school application. I went to Stanford for graduate school quite a few years ago (late 70s/early 80s), and there wasn’t any of that diversity nonsense on the application back then. I thought that was reserved for the precious little undergrads.