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11th · STEM· 2d ago

cs applicant with gold usaco, worried my essays are too generic

okay so i'm a junior at a magnet school in nj, cs-intended, pretty solid stats (usaco gold, amc 12 honor roll, founded women-in-tech club). full pay which i know helps but also means no hooks. my list is mostly t20 cs programs, cmu, mit, stanford, berkeley, georgia tech. the thing is i'm starting my common app essays and i'm realizing like... a lot of cs applicants probably say the same stuff about loving to code and wanting to solve problems. i've been coding since middle school, have some projects, but nothing that feels like a crazy research paper or viral thing. and my why-school essays are gonna be hard because everyone applying to these places probably has the same reasons. lowkey spiraling because i feel like my ecs are solid (club founding, usaco, amc) but they're not like... rare or unexpected for someone applying to mit or cmu, and i'm worried the essays are gonna be where i either stand out or just blend in with 50,000 other stem kids who did the exact same stuff. how do people actually differentiate themselves in essays when your whole app is just "i like cs"? am i overthinking this or should i be panicking 😭
#applications#essays#12th-grade
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12th· 2d ago
You're not overthinking it, you're just writing the wrong essay: stop explaining why you love cs and write about the specific moment you realized you were *different* from other coders, or the problem you got obsessed with that nobody else cared about, or the time you failed hard and what that actually felt like instead of what it "taught you."

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