University Offers Full Scholarship For Best Twitter "Essay"

Andy Chalk

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Nov 12, 2002
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University Offers Full Scholarship For Best Twitter "Essay"


The University of Iowa is offering a full scholarship worth $37,000 to the prospective student who comes up with the best application tweet in lieu of an actual essay.

So you want to go to college, but you just don't have the time or energy for all that essay-writing stuff? Good news! The University of Iowa is ready to kick in a full scholarship with a value of more than $37,000 to the person who can come up with the best application essay of 140 characters or less. You'll still have to fill out a standard application and submit your test results and essay outlining your career objectives, which is a total bummer, but the good news is that you can squeeze a significant portion of the process in between banal yammering about what you're having for lunch and how much you loathe your co-workers!

University of Iowa alumnus Kinzie Dekkenga decided to take a shot at furthering her post-secondary education after seeing the offer on Facebook [http://www.facebook.com/TippieMBA]. "Taking the burden off the 800-word-essay was a huge incentive," she said, apparently without a trace of irony. "I am on social media almost every day, so it's more comfortable to tweet than to write an essay."

Not everyone is a fan of the idea, naturally. Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto [http://www.amazon.com/You-Are-Not-Gadget-Manifesto/dp/0307389979/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1310587990&sr=8-1], accused the school of devaluing its future, and presumably post-secondary education in general, by hitching its cart to a "fad" rather than something more substantial and long-term. "It comes off as a school trying so hard to be cool," he said.

But Colleen Downie, senior assistant dean of the MBA course, defended the plan, saying, "Social media has been shown to be a powerful tool for business communication so it makes sense that our applicants demonstrate an ability to use it. This is a way for prospective students to show us that they embrace innovation and are comfortable using the kind of media and technology driving so many changes in business."

And apparently it's really hard, too. It took Dekkenga five whole days to come up with her college application tweet. "It turns out having to simplify your thoughts down was much harder than I thought," she said. "I sat on the Twitter page and just kept typing things, but I was always 100 or 200 characters over."

Sources: The Telegraph [http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2011-07-12-university-iowa-tweet-scholarship_n.htm]


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tomtom94

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May 11, 2009
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+50 points for creativity, -100 points for costing me faith in humanity.

Are these application essays similar to the Personal Statement / Section 10 in the UK? in which case, they are annoying, but necessary.
 

Roserari

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Jul 11, 2011
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That's just bloody brilliant, if you ask me. I mean, you can wow easily enough with 800 words, but with 140 characters? You'd really need to get that noggin working. This ... wow, this is just amazingly brilliant.
 

tomtom94

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May 11, 2009
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Canid117 said:
tomtom94 said:
-100 points for costing me faith in humanity.
Oh wow you are so edgy and cool!

OP: This contest is overwhelmingly stupid.
I fail to understand your sarcasm, as I am not attempting to be edgy and cool, but to explain accurately my feelings towards this development.
 

Jordi

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Jun 6, 2009
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I think it's bullshit that people would say it devalues the education. It is just one scholarship. The rest of the thousands(?) of new students will still have gotten in the old fashioned way. Is the school trying to be "too cool" by trying to follow this "fad"? Maybe. I don't know. But I do think that this is a very good intellectual exercise for those who will participate. And even if Twitter proves to be a fad, being able to communicate a lot of content very concisely will always be a tremendously useful skill. (One I have unfortunately not mastered.)
 

cairocat

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Oct 9, 2009
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I can say with an enormous amount of confidence that if the contest was simply "Write a college application in 140 characters" people would be hating on it a lot less than they are. Twitter has become associated (at least amongst the gaming-elitist-Escapist-types) with shallowness and vanity, not the best traits to tie to your college.
 

Canid117

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tomtom94 said:
Canid117 said:
tomtom94 said:
-100 points for costing me faith in humanity.
Oh wow you are so edgy and cool!

OP: This contest is overwhelmingly stupid.
I fail to understand your sarcasm, as I am not attempting to be edgy and cool, but to explain accurately my feelings towards this development.
If this destroys your faith in humanity then you have never seen anything truly terrible. Frankly I got sick of the "I harv larst my faith in humanity!" posts a long time ago.
 

emeraldrafael

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Jul 17, 2010
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How... do you make an essay, when your limit is 140 characters? thats like... thats not even an intro paragraph in my highschool's essays.

and 37000 american dollars? tahts going to pay for FOUR years of college. Not to offend anyone that went there, but what kinda education are you gettng from a state school for that much?

EDIT: THough I do hope there is a follow up story that shows who wins and what the essay was.
 

tomtom94

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May 11, 2009
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Canid117 said:
tomtom94 said:
Canid117 said:
tomtom94 said:
-100 points for costing me faith in humanity.
Oh wow you are so edgy and cool!

OP: This contest is overwhelmingly stupid.
I fail to understand your sarcasm, as I am not attempting to be edgy and cool, but to explain accurately my feelings towards this development.
If this destroys your faith in humanity then you have never seen anything truly terrible. Frankly I got sick of the "I harv larst my faith in humanity!" posts a long time ago.
Only by a hundred points. A heck of a lot more points get lost for genuinely horrifying tales like terrifying statistics on teenage behaviour/pregnancy and stupid Fox News stories and so forth.
I aim for consistency.
 

cairocat

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Oct 9, 2009
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tomtom94 said:
Canid117 said:
tomtom94 said:
Canid117 said:
tomtom94 said:
-100 points for costing me faith in humanity.
Oh wow you are so edgy and cool!

OP: This contest is overwhelmingly stupid.
I fail to understand your sarcasm, as I am not attempting to be edgy and cool, but to explain accurately my feelings towards this development.
If this destroys your faith in humanity then you have never seen anything truly terrible. Frankly I got sick of the "I harv larst my faith in humanity!" posts a long time ago.
Only by a hundred points. A heck of a lot more points get lost for genuinely horrifying tales like terrifying statistics on teenage behaviour/pregnancy and stupid Fox News stories and so forth.
I aim for consistency.
But... it's not a game. There's no grading scale, and I highly doubt FOX News cares that you docked them points. It's a metaphor, comparing the balance of 'good' and 'bad' (completely subjective) in the world to a game, and it's one that got overused a long time ago.
 

tomtom94

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May 11, 2009
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cairocat said:
tomtom94 said:
Canid117 said:
tomtom94 said:
Canid117 said:
tomtom94 said:
-100 points for costing me faith in humanity.
Oh wow you are so edgy and cool!

OP: This contest is overwhelmingly stupid.
I fail to understand your sarcasm, as I am not attempting to be edgy and cool, but to explain accurately my feelings towards this development.
If this destroys your faith in humanity then you have never seen anything truly terrible. Frankly I got sick of the "I harv larst my faith in humanity!" posts a long time ago.
Only by a hundred points. A heck of a lot more points get lost for genuinely horrifying tales like terrifying statistics on teenage behaviour/pregnancy and stupid Fox News stories and so forth.
I aim for consistency.
But... it's not a game. There's no grading scale, and I highly doubt FOX News cares that you docked them points. It's a metaphor, comparing the balance of 'good' and 'bad' (completely subjective) in the world to a game, and it's one that got overused a long time ago.
I didn't realise this caused such strong feelings. If it doesn't bother the targets, it really shouldn't bother you either. I've made my case, such as it is...
 

Zombie_Fish

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Mar 20, 2009
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emeraldrafael said:
How... do you make an essay, when your limit is 140 characters? thats like... thats not even an intro paragraph in my highschool's essays.
The whole point is that they're not looking for a full essay. It's like how with Uni dissections they will typically feature a maximum word limit, as it makes the student cut down on the fluff and unnecessary words and stick to what's important. It's essentially that taken to a whole new extreme.

I personally think this is rather clever. It is actually very hard to get a summary of why you should go to a University in under 4000 characters (personal statement limit for applications in England, if I'm correct), let alone be able to cut it down from that to a mere 140 characters. When having discussions on Twitter people often spread their comments over several tweets for a reason.

EDIT: As an idea of how hard it is to even fit a basic opinion into a tweet:

will1182 said:
I dunno, it seems kind of stupid. Anybody can tweet, not everybody can write a nice essay. Still, it would be interesting to see how this turns out.
This comment is 148 characters long. This comment saying that anybody can tweet couldn't fit into a single tweet. Now try summarising why you should both be accepted into this academic institute and also receive a $37000 scholarship in less space than the above comment.
 

blarghblarghhhhh

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Mar 16, 2010
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emeraldrafael said:
and 37000 american dollars? tahts going to pay for FOUR years of college. Not to offend anyone that went there, but what kinda education are you gettng from a state school for that much?
not even close to four years. At a community college it would go a long way, but at this school it will probably pay for a year.
 

Exterminas

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Sep 22, 2009
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tomtom94 said:
+50 points for creativity, -100 points for costing me faith in humanity.

Are these application essays similar to the Personal Statement / Section 10 in the UK? in which case, they are annoying, but necessary.
What? Since when is a thrive for less redundant text towards a higher efficency bad?

With the internet the speed at which text gets produced has multiplied. Unfortunately one human still reads as fast as ine hundred years ago. So we will eventually have to keep things efficient, to progress.

Whenever I am in my university's libarary, researching books and essays, I have to skim over most the the text, because it is redundant gibbersih already present at another place in the library.

If we want to keep our academic mill running less blabla and more efficient texts are the way to go.
 

Quaxar

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Sep 21, 2009
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Heh, I'd just twitter the link to my 2000 word essay. They surely didn't expect that!