College Admissions Essay Secrets
Each year, Harvard rejects four out of five valedictorians and hundreds of students with perfect SAT scores, leaving applicants and parents wondering what went wrong. While there is no secret formula for gaining admission to a top school, there are many ways to ensure rejection, and the most common by far is taking the admissions essay lightly.

College Admissions Essay Samples

This section contains five essays:

Law School Personal Statement Secrets
The law school personal statement, more so than essays for other graduate programs, resembles the kind of essay you wrote for your college applications. The topic is often completely open-ended. This freedom intimidates many students who prefer to have guidance and a clear notion of what admissions officers are looking for. Your goal must be to avoid depending too heavily on preconceptions and to focus instead on what you have to offer. In sum, law school admissions committees want interesting, confident, and successful people.

Muhammad
By Michael Cook

Introduction
The Muslim world extends continuously from Senegal to Pakistan, and discontinuously eastwards to the Philippines. In 1977 there were some 720 million Muslims, just over a sixth of the world's population. The proportion might have been a great deal higher if the Muslims of Spain had applied themselves more energetically to the conquest of Europe in the eighth century, if the sudden death of Timur in 1405 had not averted a Muslim invasion of China, or if Muslims had played a more prominent role in the modern settlement of the New World and the Antipodes. But they have remained the major religious group in the heart of the Old World. In terms of sheer numbers they are outdone by the Christians, and arguably also by the Marxists. On the other hand, they are considerably less affected by sectarian divisions than either of these rivals: the overwhelming majority of Muslims belong to the Sunni mainstream of Islam.

Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism By Mircea Eliade, Philip Mairet; Sheed Andrews and McMeel
I Symbolism of the "Centre"
THE PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY OF RELIGIONS
Many laymen envy the vocation of the historian of religions. What nobler or more rewarding occupation could there be than to frequent the great mystics of all the religions, to live among symbols and mysteries, to read and understand the myths of all the nations? The layman imagines that a historian of religions must be equally at home with the Greek or the Egyptian mythology, with the authentic teaching of the Buddha, the Taoist mysteries or the secret rites of initiation in archaic societies. Perhaps laymen are not altogether wrong in thinking that the historian of religions is immersed in vast and genuine problems, engaged in the decipherment of the most impressive symbols and the most complex and lofty myths from the immense mass of material that offers itself to him. Yet in fact the situation is quite different. A good many historians of religions are so absorbed in their special studies that they know little more about the Greek or Egyptian mythologies, or the Buddha's teaching, or the Taoist or shamanic techniques, than any amateur who has known how to direct his reading. Most of them are really familiar with only one poor little sector of the immense domain of religious history. And, unhappily, even this modest sector is, more often than not, but superficially exploited by the decipherment, editing and translation of texts, historical monographs or the cataloguing of monuments, etc. Confined to an inevitably limited subject, the historian of religions often has a feeling that he has sacrificed the fine spiritual career of his youthful dreams to the dull duty of scientific probity.