UT-Austin Computer Science Class of 2024 Admitted Applicant Essays and Review
Rome’s Colosseum
With their permission, I have reproduced a real student’s application so that way you can see their entire portrait rather than the more commonly self-reported credentials on places like Reddit or College Confidential that often lack the essays. Studying applications offers a glimpse into how reviewers assess and score applications and offer food for thought when you’re crafting your own application.
At the end of this post, I assess their potential Personal Achievement Index score on a scale of 1 to 6. Since one hundred reviewers will read the same application slightly differently, not everyone is going to score each application the same. I provide theoretical score probabilities and my best guess of what they received in practice.
If you want to learn more about how reviewers read and review applications, I recommend my comprehensive UT admissions guide Your Ticket to the Forty Acres for an in-depth look at the admissions scoring process.
Background and resume highlights
Family: Middle to high income, large suburban public school, white, male
Academics: Rank top 2% with a 36 ACT (36m / 35v) for an Academic Index of 3.95 / 4
Resume Summary: Code Ninjas lead regional coordinator, Robotics Team lead website developer, Eagle Scout, UIL Journalism captain and state qualifier, four-year Varsity lacrosse, Speech/Debate Captain and national All-American and state qualifier since sophomore year, eight independent coding/software/audio projects requiring 750+ hours, and 550+ hours volunteering.
Essay A Tell Us Your Story
I looked around and couldn’t believe my eyes. Molded clothes rested on frayed couches. Abandoned toys sat next to damaged compressors. Damp letters seeped through mailbox doors. It surprised me how quickly appliances rust. Two weeks after Hurricane Harvey departed, homeowners still milled about in shocked disbelief. We drove past the lives of so many families, contained in trash bags at the end of their driveways, waiting to be picked up and dumped in a landfill.
When Harvey hit two years ago, we were fortunately spared. I still shudder at tornado warnings and fear the next big one, but my best friend Davis’s life would never be the same. He lost his house, not in the initial deluge, but when the army corps of engineers released a levy by his neighborhood that was overflowing with storm surge. His family didn’t have flood insurance, but I was thankful that FEMA eventually awarded them about $40,000 to help rebuild.
Davis and I played club and high school lacrosse together since we were ten, and our parents are close friends. During the two weeks it took for all the water to recede, the police blocked entry to his subdivision to prevent looting and theft. As soon as possible, our lacrosse teammates and I mobilized and went to his house.
Harvey poured problems on hundreds of thousands of families. Our efforts were hardly a drop in the bucket compared to the overall catastrophe, but an accumulation of individual effort eventually filled buckets for Davis and his family. We removed everything from the first floor: drywall, insulation, flooring, appliances, furniture, and memorabilia. It took our team of thirty over ten hours to finish the demolition and sort the debris into piles on the front lawn for eventual removal.
We were all a little nervous about talking to Davis because we thought that we’d struggle to find words that would provide emotional support. In reality, sincerity and support came naturally. It’s surreal how we talked about new plays for the upcoming season while shattering tile and ripping out drywall. We took turns straining ourselves to smash the water-soaked floor tiles, making sure no-one got too exhausted. Our parents found it just as natural to support Davis’s. What can you do besides make small talk about Bevo City sports and the heat and humidity?
For most of my life, sports began and ended with proving I was the best, winning championships, or earning a college scholarship. I competed in Division 1 showcases before breaking my wrist twice, limiting my future athletic opportunities. After Harvey, I realized that teamwork and camaraderie go beyond the field, and our relationships mean more than state rankings.
Although it felt great to be there with my team helping Davis, I couldn’t help but think of the other 30,000 displaced peoples, many of whom lacked flood insurance. Our 300-man hours merely demolished a home they still needed to rebuild. Witnessing nature’s power made me feel smaller and weaker than I ever had before, but it’s clear I wasn’t alone in feeling that way.
Harvey inspired a team of computer scientists to found Organization, Whereabouts, and Logistics (OWL) to aid with natural disasters. They won IBM’s inaugural Call for Code challenge. OWL offers a hardware/software solution that provides first responders with a simple interface for managing natural disasters. Their system could have provided better information to the Army Corps of Engineers to better inform whether flooding Davis’s neighborhood was necessary.
Even as the next lacrosse season started, and Davis, along with our other displaced friends, returned home after almost a year of rebuilding and renovating, I didn’t forget about project OWL. It’s open-source, meaning anyone can visit with and modify the code. I started to try and contribute to the project but felt too intimidated to do much because I didn’t understand most of the code, let alone have the competence to improve it.
Throughout junior year, I focused on personal projects to improve my skills. I finally developed the confidence to contact the project OWL founders. It turns out one of them lives a few minutes drive away. We connected, and he gave me complete access to the source code and hardware challenges. I’ve been both working on the user-interface part of the software and creating new enclosures for the hardware. Wherever my college journey or career takes me, using technology to help society will remain at my forefront.
Major Short Answer
Computer science connects many disciplines beyond programming and computing. Machine learning requires calculus, and AP Physics introduced me to how vectors accurately calculate bullet-drop in a video-game. During AP US History, I wondered how the government or polling agencies could move beyond paper surveys and phone calls to gather more accurate data and analyze population shifts.
Some of my programming friends prefer to work alone, but I do best in groups. My favorite moments in school are History and English class group discussions, but my teachers throughout school always tell me we can’t have them very often. Learning happens with exchange and dialog and not rote memorization and emphasis on testing. Moreover, a few students often dominate conversations that subsequently veer off-topic and spawn unproductive arguments.
I’m a debate captain at school, so I wanted to address a lack of classroom discussion civility by creating an online forum www.organizeddebate.com. It’s unique because posts require a logical structure: claim, evidence, implication, and consideration of counterarguments. It also has functionality for teachers to grade students based on participation and effectiveness. My English and history teachers are beta testing by assigning homework and structuring in-class discussions to bridge the online world.
One challenge competing in robotics is identifying and building alliances with other squads. We have limited data, so there’s no way to know their strengths and weaknesses and if a partnership offers a competitive advantage. We created a website that provides scouting forms that automatically analyze tournament reports and offers partner recommendations. I currently serve as project lead.
However, even when I’m not the one coding, computer science allows me to empower others. Working at CodeNinjas, a children’s programming learning center, I’ve designed a curriculum for Java, Python, and full-stack web-design. One of my twelve-year-old students, Nate, is creating a forum for his church. After going through my Python curriculum, Josh, who’s only eleven, decided that he wanted to use Python to analyze twitter posts so that he could prove more people were mentioning his favorite game, Fortnite, than my favorite, League of Legends.
Leadership Short Answer
When I first started playing lacrosse, I was unbelievably bad, and I knew it. I snuck to the back of the line during drills to avoid embarrassing myself. I started playing at ten and probably wouldn’t have continued to my next birthday if not for Tristan, a HS junior who came to all our practices and saw that I was struggling. He offered small, specific areas for improvement and encouraged me to keep playing. “Lift your elbows up” is much a much more achievable goal than “pass the ball ten yards.” A dozen cues and hundreds of repetitions later, I managed to pass the ball cross-field.
When I became a junior, I became a Tristan for a middle school team as their volunteer head coach. None of the players seemed quite as bad as me at their age, but they needed refinement of the basics and introductions to more advanced techniques. We all struggle playing sports full-time while maintaining our grades. Anxiety in school leads to poor play on the field.
They all complained about their math and science classes because they’re hard, and their test days conflict with lacrosse practices. I lobbied to move our practices to non-test days, so my players didn’t need to choose between sports and school. Additionally, I coordinated weekly small-group tutoring sessions. We looked over missed questions on quizzes and tests and helped with homework. Not only did their grades improve, but they practiced with more focus and fewer complaints. Everyone earned A’s and B’s, and we still placed second in the league.
Providing progressive tips like Tristan helped me improve on our previous debate captain’s approach. Before, newbies presented a speech in front of varsity members on their first day. Most felt too embarrassed to attempt a second. Now, novices present their first four speeches alone with only a camera watching. Varsity members anonymously review the footage and provide constructive criticism linked to time stamps. Novices feel more comfortable practicing, and experienced members improve their feedback. Morale is high, we practice more cooperatively, and we’ve found more success at tournaments.
Diversity Short Answer
For my sixteenth birthday, my dad passed me the keys to his black-on-black 1990 Mercury Cougar XR7: purring supercharged 3.6L engine, automatic seatbelts, power windows, rear-wheel drive, automatic transmission, and 140,000 miles. I’ve admired his custom-ordered car since riding in the plastic-and-foam car seat. Receiving its keys felt like adopting a pet, if it were a temperamental yet loving lion that required a new surgery every few weeks.
Every breakdown turns my stomach. Might this be the day when the Cougar departs to Car Heaven? When the windshield wipers, radio, and windows kept randomly switching on and off, I was terrified that the entire wiring system malfunctioned. My dad and I refuse to visit mechanics, mostly on principle, so the Mercury online forum is our best friend. A quick query supplied us with a wiring diagram.
It pointed to a bad ignition switch, but my stomach refused to unknot. We removed the plastic shield for the steering column and breathed a sigh of relief. The ignition pins weren’t contacting the rest of the switch. After replacing the switch, I decided that, for the first time in over a decade of fixing the Coug, I had to take a keepsake picture. My dad rolled his eyes.
Don’t tell the Coug, but I may be leaving her for my mistress, a computer-science degree. At age nine, my dad signed me up for a STEM summer camp. Conscientious yet outdated, he sent me with a Windows 3.1 manual “Learn Java in 24 hours.” Beaming, I showed it to Tony, my camp counselor. He laughed raucously.
By eighth grade, I created a text-based game that let players explore Algeasia, the setting of the Inheritance Cycle, my favorite novels. Even in high school, I was a programming late-bloomer. I took AP Computer Science A my freshman year, but I didn’t know about programming competitions and robotics until my sophomore year was nearly over.
My parents don’t pressure me to compete in prestigious competitions, and I didn’t have my college admissions journey planned out of the womb. Instead, I follow my interests broadly. Freshman year, I ran a 4:48 mile in track, played Division 1 lacrosse showcases, earned my Eagle Scout rank, and qualified for NSDA debate nationals. My varied interests beyond STEM will contribute to CS classrooms and organizations.
Turing Honors Essay
By eighth grade, I created a text-based game that let players explore Algeasia, the setting of the Inheritance Cycle, my favorite novels. I shared my efforts on “Will Eide’s blog,” but nobody ever visited because I didn’t realize it was a desktop HTML file and not a live webpage. It was probably for the best, though. In hindsight, my two-dozen Minecraft mods and fantasy-novel themed games were like rusted out rat-rods pieced together with code from dodgy forums. Unlike some of my friends, neither of my parents were programmers, and I didn’t have middle-school computer science classes.
I’m mostly self-taught. When I was 11 years old, my Dad made me burn hundreds of his old CDs onto iTunes. Tinkering in iTunes led me to its audio visualizer. It fascinated me to literally see music. However, I noticed an issue. The developers didn’t make the visualizer display an image of what I perceive music to actually look like.
Sophomore year summer, I used JavaFX, Java Media Framework (JMF), and Java Sound to create my own audio visualizer. Sound is really just air pressure on your eardrum proportional to the movement of a speaker, itself proportional to the wire voltage. Voltage translates to application bites that transform into sleek graphics.
JMF allowed me to extract the audio data. Java Sound unpacked the data into bytes. A processing thread accumulated and processed those bytes then wrapped the results into displayed JavaFX objects. Literally hundreds of hours and thousands of lines of code later, music appeared as I perceived.
I worked primarily in Java during my freshman and sophomore CS classes; however, I explored other languages in an “independent study” CS class junior year. I already knew HTML, CSS, and basic JavaScript from self-study, so I pursued full-stack capabilities by learning AngularJS, PHP, and MySQL. I created a login system that stored browser cookies for persistent-login, included a password reset feature by email, and allowed users to change their account details.
Second semester, I focused on automation with python. Using twython, a wrapper of the Twitter API, along with the Open Weather Map API and the PIL library, I created a twitter-bot that posted the weather in Bevo City, my hometown, every four hours as an image. Additionally, using the Reddit API, I made a bot that analyzed subreddit comments for a certain keyword and then processed the surrounding text with the WNAffect library to identify the general sentiment of the comment. I calibrated the bot with the names of politicians to gain a quantitative, visual pulse on hot-button issues.
My Computer Science experiences currently serve me well in my job at CodeNinjas where I oversee creating curriculum for Java, Python, and full-stack web-design classes. It allows me to be a unique value add because my knowledge means I can expand our client-base to older students. Before, we catered mainly to younger learners. Now, with the new curriculum, we have adults taking classes alongside middle schoolers.
Admissions Results/Analysis
Review thoughts: This applicant is a refreshing departure from many of the STEM and CS dominant resumes and profiles. It’s impressive that they’re self-taught and have had to work harder to develop their interests and pursue opportunities indicated by their various independent and open-source projects. Their extensive commitment to speech, debate, journalism, and Eagle Scouts presents a rare student for potential computer science programs while still demonstrating a deep interest in STEM activities and hobbies. The Diversity essay is extremely effective and could be an essay in its own right. They illustrate exactly how they’re independently motivated with little input or pressure from their parents. They demonstrate what reviewers are looking for when they mean authenticity and curiosity.
Their application as a whole was also an interesting experiment because they emphasized being a generalist rather than the more common specialists who have deep commitments to STEM but little else. They ranked in the top 2% and scored a 36 on the ACT and gained admission to UTCS early, but ended up getting waitlisted at a lot of universities. We agree that we wouldn’t have changed the approach at all and that he submitted his best applications, but it raises larger questions about whether admissions committees really want curious, well-rounded leaders or if they prefer students who maximize their STEM activities that may or may not be genuinely interested in their activities. If I were running a university, these are precisely the kinds of students I would prioritize highest.
It’s almost certain that almost all reviewers would see this applicant as at least a 5. It’s possible a grump reviewer not impressed by their generalist approach may not see them as sufficiently fit for computer science. I also think there is enough here for some reviewers to score them the highest 6 because it’s clear they have maximized the resources in their environment.
Admissions Score Probabilities:
One: 0%
Two: 0%
Three: 0%
Four: 5%
Five: 60%
Six: 35%
Likely score: 5.5
Decision: Early admit to CS, denied Turing
Other notable decisions: Georgia Tech, Purdue, and Notre Dame