How to write a college essay about an ordinary experience

RReaders in Stanford's admissions office, the office we learned from, looked for intellectual vitality that shows up outside the classroom, yet most applicants keep their academic interests and their lives in separate essays. Good writers rarely do. Malcolm Gladwell once took casuistry, a method of moral reasoning refined by the Jesuits that judges a hard case by comparing it to clear ones, and turned it on a baseball steroid scandal.

A pitcher shamed for using steroids to heal an injured arm, he argued, looked more like a pitcher who had elbow surgery to regain his old form, plainly fair, than a slugger who took steroids and broke records, plainly not. He had pointed a scholarly tool at something everyone already had an opinion about. Whether he was right matters less than what he did with the tool, and an applicant can do something similar with far smaller material.