Baking Cookies
This girl got accepted to Harvard. We don’t know anything about her other essays or what was on her resume, but this essay is strong. Let’s analyze!
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Each time I bake cookies, they come out differently. Butter, sugar, eggs, flour — I measure with precision, stir with vigor, then set the oven to 375°F. The recipe is routine, yet hardly redundant.
After a blizzard left me stranded indoors with nothing but a whisk and a pantry full of the fundamentals, I made my first batch: a tray of piping hot chocolate chunkers whose melt-in-the-mouth morsels comforted my snowed-in soul. Such a flawless description, however, belies my messy process. In reality, my method was haphazard and carefree, the cookies a delicious fortuity that has since been impossible to replicate.
Each subsequent batch I make is a gamble. Will the cookies flatten and come out crispy? Stay bulbous and gooey? Am I a bad baker, or are they inherently capricious? Even with a recipe book full of suggestions, I can never place a finger on my mistake. The cookies are fickle and short-tempered. Baking them is like walking on eggshells — and I have an empty egg carton to prove it. Perhaps beginner’s luck had been the secret ingredient all along.
Yet, curiosity keeps me flipping to the same page in my recipe book. I became engrossed in perfecting the cookies not by the mechanical satisfaction of watching ingredients combine into batter, but by the chance to wonder at simplicity. The inconsistency is captivating. It is, after all, a strict recipe, identical ingredients combined in the same permutation. How can such orthodox steps yield such radical, unpredictable results? Even with the most formulaic tasks, I am questioning the universe.
Chemistry explains some of the anomaly. For instance, just a half-pinch extra of baking soda can have astounding ramifications on how the dough bubbles. The kitchen became my laboratory: I diaried each trial like a scientist; I bought a scale for more accurate measurements; I borrowed “On Food and Cooking: the Science and Lore of the Kitchen” from the library. But all to no avail — the variables refused to come together in any sort of equilibrium.
I then approached the problem like a pianist, taking the advice my teacher wrote in the margins of my sheet music and pouring it into the mixing bowl. There are 88 pitches on a keyboard, and there are a dozen ingredients in the recipe. To create a rhapsodic dessert, I needed to understand all of the melodic and harmonic lines and how they complemented one another. I imagined the recipe in Italian script, the chocolate chips as quick staccatos suspended in a thick adagio medium. But my fingers always stumbled at the coda of each performance, the details of the cookies turning to a hodgepodge of sound.
I whisk, I sift, I stir, I pre-heat the oven again, but each batch has its flaws, either too sweet, burnt edges, grainy, or underdone. Though the cookies were born of boredom, their erratic nature continues to fascinate me. Each time my efforts yield an imperfect result, I develop resilience to return the following week with a fresh apron, ready to try again. I am mesmerized by the quirks of each trial. It isn’t enough to just mix and eat — I must understand.
My creative outlook has kept the task engaging. Despite the repetition in my process, I find new angles that liven the recipe. In college and beyond, there will be things like baking cookies, endeavors that seem so unvaried they risk spoiling themselves to a housewife’s drudgery. But from my time in the kitchen, I have learned how to probe deeper into the mechanics of my tasks, to bring music into monotony, and to turn work into play. However the cookie crumbles in my future, I will approach my work with curiosity, creativity, and earnestness.
What Worked
If you’ve been my student for a little while, you might have noticed the Categorization happening here! If you’re just visiting the page, Categorization is the name I assign to texts that discuss the same exact thing as if it were 20 different things. In this case, she’s making the exact same recipe, but somehow making 20 completely different batches of cookies. And those batches of cookies are portraying very different emotional vibes.
This is really useful, because it allows your essay to feel coherent and simple while also discussing a wide variety of emotions and personal development. You don’t really want to write your college essay about 20 different things. There are ways to do it, but it can feel really cluttered. But, you DO want to convey different emotions and growth in various areas of your life. Using something like a single cookie recipe as your base, you can take the reader through several elements of your personality, like this essay does quite artfully.
She’s also humble, but she doesn’t have to state that directly. You always want to SHOW more than you Tell in these college essays, but there are some things that you have to 100% Show and 0% tell. Humility is, I think, one of those things. It’s just really tough to write a sentence like, “I was just so humble” and not come off like a dork. So, she uses Show don’t Tell very skillfully here to convey that her cookies didn’t always work; she’s certainly not perfect; and she’s okay with being a “failure”. She really drives that home towards the end. Remember, your college essay doesn’t need to be (and shouldn’t be) about how perfectly perfect and flawless you are and how you never mess up anything ever, not even for a second. That would be an unbelievably boring essay, and would probably sound too pompous.
She uses humor. The joke about having an empty egg carton to prove that she’s walking on eggshells is a cute and simple joke. Humor is really powerful in these essays. I encourage my students to find childhood stories when they were cute and silly, middle school and high school stories when they had those types of human experiences that are quite funny in retrospect, and just humorous moments in any stories they tell.
Then she gets into the big Curiosity push of her essay. She’s thinking deeply about this cookie conundrum, taking it seriously, treating it as a broader metaphor for all of life and the universe. She’s connecting this to Chemistry (makes sense), and showing that she’s an astute scientist even in something small like cookies. She shows that she has furthered her own research into the topics of baking and science. It doesn’t work.
And so she takes a new approach, a new perspective. She looks at the problem like a pianist. She uses an extended metaphor to bring art and life and intrigue to this discussion. And she shows us that she can approach problems uniquely. Most people don’t try to fix a baking problem by looking at sheet music. That’s unique.
Notice, also, that she is subtly communicating a passion for science and piano without having to say “I’ve been playing piano for 11 years, and I really want to study science.” There is a place for that sentence in a different essay, but this is the common app essay. This essay is meant to be a story of her and her journey. It’s not meant to be a recitation of her resume, line by line.
She also tells us so much about herself throughout this essay. She likes to revisit things to learn more from them. (This is broadly uncommon, most people want to just keep charging ahead to the next topic.) She is a clever writer, which suggests a clever mind. She’s fascinated by erratic things, mesmerized by quirks. (Most people like predictable and reliable things.) She deeply wants to understand, and we know from reading this that she doesn’t JUST want to understand cookies. If she’s this dedicated to understanding cookies, then she must be even more dedicated to understanding whatever it is that she wants to study. She would of course reinforce this in her supplemental essays. She’s also willing to do the hard, often boring work that leads to great discoveries, and she’ll do it with flavor and fun. (Most people just want the glamorous and glorious parts of discovery, and they either want to avoid the hard parts, or they simply don’t understand what the realities of the hard and boring parts will look like. The latter is a common issue I see in student essays.)
And then she ends with a cute cliché about “how the cookie crumbles”. Do I hate the cliché? Nope. It’s cute; it’s fun; it reinforced her previous sentence about being fun and playful. And sometimes in life, it’s time to use a cliché.
What Doesn’t Work?
Not much. I would suggest that she could have added an example to the idea that similar processes lead to different results. She could have connected it to science or another field, ideally something she herself had personally experienced. Possibly even a more personal experience, not academic. But, there’s always a trade off of more specificity vs word count.