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- Students hate writing essays. It is easy to get wrapped up in the traditional 5
- paragraph essay which is dull and boring. When writing a college essay, you have
- more freedom since you are telling a personal narrative. Since you are writing a
- story, you want to make it interesting. You should not rephrase the prompt which
- you are responding to, and you should not write about anything that the
- admissions office already knows. Your application already mentions all the
- clubs, classes, sports, and volunteer service you do-- so don’t mention them.
-
- I don’t want to go off on a huge tangent about how to write the perfect college
- essay, I’m not an expert. However, I would like to share my personal college
- essay which got me accepted into RIT and Clarkson last year. As a computer
- science applicant, it is a great idea to write your college essay based on the
- programming experience you had outside of school.
-
- September 13, 2016
-
- >Prompt: Describe a problem you’ve solved
- >
- >/\* HTTP ERROR 500 \*/
- >
- >\#include\<stdio.h\>
- >
- >main()
- >{
- >printf("
- >
- > On a dim screen in the corner of my room flashed the dreadful message- HTTP
- > ERROR 500. That simple warning taunted, probed, and questioned my mind for
- > hours on end. As I pivoted my binocular gaze from the computer to out the
- > window, I saw the front yard dimly lit by the drowsy moon. Time for a second
- > stood still as the crickets chirped and the trees swayed in the cool summer
- > breeze. Closing my eyes for that second of silence made me realize how tired
- > I really was. A beeping, piercing, and dinging sound focused my gaze back to
- > the computer. Still flashing was that error reminding me that I had a long
- > night ahead.
- >
- > For the past two weeks I had been working on an employee management system
- > for a store. This web based system was to keep track of employee hours for
- > payroll. The project was near complete; however, there was a few bugs left
- > to fix. The most annoying of which was password verification for the
- > webform. Now nearing the end of the development cycle, the project was
- > suppose to go live tomorrow.
- >
- > Debugging a project is often a daunting task for programmers. Simply finding
- > an error is like finding a misspelled word in the dictionary. Correcting the
- > misspelling may be easy but finding that word is another story. What I love
- > about programming is that the program does exactly what I tell it to do. If
- > it makes a mistake it’s because I told it to, not because it feels tired, or
- > doesn't like me. Every bug, error, and glitch I unintentionally create.
- > These bugs eventually come out to the surface like a fish gasping for air.
- > An error is never just a mistake. It represents something much larger- an
- > error in my way of thinking. Debugging is a process that enables me to
- > further understand the program and crush the bug like the parasite it is.
- >
- > Sitting back in my chair in deep thought I resumed the process of scanning,
- > poking, and probing my code for any source of the error. For the past hour I
- > narrowed the source of the error to ten lines of dubious code. Pondering
- > these lines of code I added an echo statement which allows me to see the
- > inner workings of the code. The error became as clear as day, the password
- > was not getting hashed: a feature that adds security to password storage.
- > Excitedly I typed a few lines of code to fix this problem. Then swiftly I
- > pressed execute, only to my disappointment to receive a different error
- > code. Eyes glazed over, I realized my mistake. In the process of debugging I
- > left a block of code commented out.
- >
- > On a dim screen in the corner of my room beamed the message- Currently
- > Working.
- >
- >");
- >}
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