How to show real academic interest on your application

RReaders in Stanford's admissions office are trained skeptics, and a sentence announcing that an applicant loves a subject is the sentence they discount fastest. A student who wants to study astrophysics usually reaches for Neil Armstrong's line about one small step, which readers have met in hundreds of essays and which proves only that the student has heard of the Moon landing. One applicant wrote instead that the first foot on the Moon was a left one, in a boot with many-layered sidewalls and a silicone sole, several times heavier on Earth than on the lunar surface, where Armstrong found the ground as fine as powdered charcoal.

She never said she loved space, and nobody reading it doubted her. What she did can be learned, though it has more than one part.