How humanities students can show research for college

RReaders in Stanford's admissions office treated writing as the humanities student's form of research, and credited it the way they credited a science student's lab work. The parallel is exact once you see it: a scientist runs an experiment and writes up results, while a student of history, literature or philosophy reads widely, synthesizes, and tries to say something new.

Most humanities students do the reading and the thinking and then stop, leaving the work in a notebook or a class folder where no reader will ever find it. Their files end up looking less ambitious than a lab student's, though the minds behind them may be every bit as serious. The office's advice was to write constantly and to aim well above your station, and where to aim is the whole question.