芝加哥大学成立于公元1890年，校区位于芝加哥〈Chicago〉闹区，是全美最有名的10大私立学校之一。在学校草创初期，由于获得当时美国石油大王约翰·洛克斐勒〈John D Rockefeller〉的经济援助，让校园内部的软硬件规格在短短10年内便赶上了美国其它老字号大学的规格，再加上校园的地理位置就在美国的金融大镇—芝加哥，芝加哥大学在一创校后就成为美国人心目中的名校之一。
下面介绍芝加哥大学本科申请要点及申请短文题目。
申请材料Required Materials
· Common Application Complete the Common Application and the University of Chicago Supplement. Both may be completed online on the Common Application’s website. If you choose to apply on paper, mail the Common Application and the Chicago Supplement, including your essays, along with your application fee. Please click here for further instructions on applying on- and off-line.
$65 Application Fee
Chicago Supplement with Essays
· Secondary School Report and International School Supplement to the Secondary School Report.
Teachers’ Evaluations Give these forms to teachers who know you well and can write about your strengths as a student. We require one recommendation from an English or social studies teacher and one from a science or mathematics teacher. Please follow these guidelines as closely as you can, but feel free to contact us if you have a question about what kind of teacher can write each recommendation. Foreign language teachers may not write either recommendation. All high school counselors and teachers have the option of submitting letters of recommendation and school forms online via the Common Application. High school counselors and teachers should follow the instructions on the Common Application for submitting these forms. Counselors and teachers may print out these forms and submit them on paper even if you are applying online
· Test Scores
Have official SAT Reasoning or ACT scores sent to the University of Chicago from the testing agency, even if your scores appear on your transcript. We do not require any SAT Subject Tests. Our SAT code is 1832; the ACT code is 1152. All testing must be completed prior to the application deadline. There is no need to arrange for rush delivery of your scores.
If you choose to submit ACT scores, we do not require the optional essay component. We do not use the writing section of the SAT in our admission process. We will use the sections of the SAT Reasoning test with the highest scores when evaluating applications, along with the highest ACT composite score.
TOEFL104 / IELTS 7.0
Midyear Report
Essay Questions
This Year's Essay Questions
Essay Option 1
"At present you need to live the question."—Rainer Maria Rilke, translated from the German by Joan M. Burnham.
Inspired by Sarah Marikar, a third-year in the College.
Essay Option 2
The short film Powers of Ten begins with an aerial shot of a couple picnicking in a Chicago park. The camera zooms out ten meters. It then zooms out again, but the degree of the zoom has increased by a power of ten; the camera is now 100 meters away. It continues to 1,000 meters, then 10,000, and so on, traveling through the solar system, the galaxy, and eventually to the edge of the known universe. Here the camera rests, allowing us to examine the vast nothingness of the universe, black void punctuated sparsely by galaxies so far away they appear as small stars. The narrator comments, "This emptiness is normal. The richness of our own neighborhood is the exception." Then the camera reverses its journey, zooming in to the picnic, and—in negative powers of ten—to the man’s hand, the cells in his hand, the molecules of DNA within, their atoms, and then the nucleus both "so massive and so small" in the "vast inner space" of the atom.
Zoom in and out on a person, place, event, or subject of interest. What becomes clear from far away that you can’t see up close? What intricate structures appear when you move closer? How is the big view related to the small, the emptiness to the richness?
Inspired by Lee Burwasser, a graduate of J. R. Masterman High School, Philadelphia, PA.
Essay Option 3
Chicago author Nelson Algren said, "A writer does well if in his whole life he can tell the story of one street." Chicagoans, but not just Chicagoans, have always found something instructive, and pleasing, and profound in the stories of their block, of Main Street, of Highway 61, of a farm lane, of the Celestial Highway. Tell us the story of a street, path, road—real or imagined or metaphorical.
Essay Option 4
Argonne National Laboratory and Fermilab (both national laboratories managed by the University of Chicago) have particle accelerators that smash bits of atoms together at very high energies, allowing particles to emerge that are otherwise not part of the everyday world. These odd beasts—Z bosons, pi mesons, strange quarks—populated the universe seconds after the Big Bang, and allow their observers to glimpse the fabric of the universe.
Put two or three ideas or items in a particle accelerator thought experiment. Smash 'em up. What emerges? Let us glimpse the secrets of the universe newly revealed.
Inspired by Katharine Bierce, a third-year in the College.
Essay Option 5
Take as a model Options 1 through 4 as you pose and respond to a prompt of your own. Please do not submit an essay written for the Common Application. Your prompt should be original and thoughtful. Draw on your best qualities as a writer, thinker, visionary, social critic, sage, sensible woman or man, citizen of the world, or future citizen of the University of Chicago; take a little risk and have fun.
