How to write a Yale science essay for non-scientists

YYale's admissions committee can include a faculty member, as Jeffrey Brenzel, the university's former dean of admissions, described, and a former senior assistant director there added a detail that should change how technical students write. Committees sometimes put an essay up on a screen in front of everyone in the room, including a professor whose own field may be nothing like yours, so a chemistry essay can end up read aloud to a historian.

That is a hard audience for a student who has spent two years in a lab, because the instinct is to prove depth to the experts one admires. If the historian is lost by the second paragraph, the essay has failed at the moment it mattered most, and the student who wrote it will never learn why.