In the spring of 2017, less than six months into the heightened political and racial tensions of the Trump administration, a high school senior from Princeton, New Jersey, received national media attention for subverting the form of one of our most underappreciated literary genres: the college application essay. In response to the clichéd but nevertheless revealing prompt, “What matters to you and why?” 17-year-old Ziad Ahmed filled a blank page with a single social justice hashtag, typing it out a total of 100 times: #BlackLivesMatter.
Ultimately, Ahmed earned a coveted acceptance to Stanford, where less than 5 percent of the university’s nearly 45,000 applicants are admitted annually. The essay was only one component of Ahmed’s multipart application, complementing his AP courses, SAT scores, letters of recommendation, and GPA. But the coverage from mainstream outlets intriguingly focused on what amounted to a feat of creative ingenuity and foresight: a young writer’s savvy reading of the presumed tastes of his target audience, in this case the older, liberal, and highly educated admissions readers of an ultra-elite university.
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