IELTS: 7.5, received the score yesterday
(don't think its useful info aside from the fact I'm not gonna get rejected for English, so hooray?)

Are you sending applications right now or waiting a bit? What are your top 3 ideas for admission essay subjects? Have you done any interesting coding projects?

1. I'm not sending applications right now. I'll do that when I'm in 12th grade.

2. None.

3. Yeah, but those heavily relied on use of language models to construct the code.

No worries about using LLMs, the "what" and "why" is more important than the "how."

If you make a decent pull request to make manifold or some other open source project more accessible to people of different cultures or abilities, you'll have something to write about and I'll buy some YES

Pull request? Like write my own code and ask for it to be integrated into the manifold website?

That's a thing? Isn't the risk of backdoors too high to allow randos to write code?

Yep it's a thing! You're right that's a risk, but the code gets reviewed by an expert before it's accepted so most malicious stuff gets blocked.

If this is just "for something to write about", it seems excessive. I said I didn't have college essay ideas because I didn't know what colleges would ask in an essay. Based on ChatGPT's response of what common essay topics are, I came up with a few:

• studied a lot of math in hopes that I could get to an international competition. I didn't, but I found friends at the math circle and I'm happy with that.

• made a friend in 9th grade when I was quiet and I didn't really like that friend at first but over time we influenced each other a lot.

• took AP Calculus AB with my friend a year before everyboody else.

• I'm half-Arab, half-European, which is interesting, but I can't think of any important nonobvious way this has shaped me.

• I can't think of anything for some of the things ChatGPT said: community engagement? leadership?

If it's not just for something to write about, and you really think it would be valuable as an extracurricular, where would I even start with something like this? I don't know what language manifold uses. I half-know ONE programming language (python). There are 40 days of summer left. I'm not convinced this is worth doing. If I put 20 hours into this project, how likely do you think I can complete it by then?

Yep I thought it would be a good extracurricular and maybe build skills that would be useful later. Plus it handles the community engagement and leadership angle that you mentioned.

Unfortunately Python won't help you contribute to manifold, it uses Typescript and React, so it would be a big challenge. I bet you could still do it if you pick a really small improvement.

Just an idea, if it doesn't inspire you I'm sure you'll find other opportunities

@tarehart @AhmedButCooler I'm also someone who's only familiar with Python, but I did make a PR to the Manifold database adding spent mana in the positions tab which eventually got accepted. I got some help with ChatGPT and I checked the results of the compilation on the manifold test website to make sure.