When a student is writing a College Admission Essay, the rhetorical situation is that they are trying to stand out from other students by persuading the college admission staff that they are a perfect fit for their school campus. The student is taking the most interesting, unique, resilient, and intelligent moments of their lives and exaggerating them into these well written essays.
When beginning to write these essays, the first thing most people do is search for examples. That is what makes the College Application Essay a genre. As Dirk says, when there already has been a first response to a situation, people look back to that first response, to base their response. It has been done for generations and generations and so the essays all have similar formats, techniques and topics. I am a victim myself as I would repeatedly search, “College Admission Essay Examples” into my browser. What I found, was in most college essays the students wanted to prove that they have a lot to offer. Because they were captain of their varsity basketball team, they have qualities of a leader. Or through a traumatic event in their life, they overcame that obstacle and were resilient. Through anecdotes about service trips, they show their quality of helping others and how they can give back to the community. By putting all this information in the College Application essay, they were all hoping to please a member of the admission staff. And just like them, I took my graphic designing talent, my Lebanese background, my traumatic medical issue, and put together these unique essays, conforming to the norm of the genre. Just like everyone else, I wanted the admission staff to perceive me the way I wanted, and the following year I landed my spot here at USD.
Really good ideas on the college apps as a genre. I think you should make a second paragraph and talk about what techniques/examples you used in particular with your essay to USD (or other schools) and tie it in with Kerry Dirks’s ideas about rhetorical situation/location.
I also think when you talk about the college application essay as a genre, clarify what you mean by “the first thing most people do is search for examples”.
Marie, a good start overall, but make sure you explicitly refer to Dirk’s definitions and terminology, and use examples from your own essays (for USD or another school) as examples of ways in which you did or didn’t conform to the genre as you understood it. If you personally searched for examples before you started writing your own essay, it would be worth expanding on that point a bit.