Students tweet their way into college

Could you write a $37,000 tweet? A tweet is a short message that people write on Twitter.

Normally in the US, applicants have to write two 800-word essays to try to get a place at the University of Iowa. But this year the university is asking them to write one essay and one tweet, which must be no more than 140 characters long. The applicant who writes the best tweet, about why they would make the perfect business student, will get a $37,000 scholarship to the university’s business school. University director Jodi Schafer hopes the new rules will encourage applicants to be more original and creative.

One of the applicants is Seth Goldstein from Columbus in Ohio. He says, “It is something different and out of the box. No other business schools I have applied to have anything like this.” Another applicant, Kinzie Dekkenga, spent five days trying to write the perfect tweet. “I am on social media almost every day so it's more comfortable to tweet than it is to write an essay,” says Kinzie. “But it turns out that having to simplify your thoughts is much harder than I thought it was. I sat on the Twitter page and just kept typing things, but my tweet was always 100 or 200 characters too long.”