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Michael Nielsen has a beautiful new essay on moral imagination: the ability humans have to 'develop and transmit new notions of good action, indeed, even new kinds of good'.
As examples, he gives:
* Hammurabi's creation of a code of laws (in 1754 BCE) and his justification of his rule not in terms of divine or hereditary right, but by the delivery of justice to his citizens.
* St Gregory of Nyssa's...
Instead of mentioning effective altruism, can you talk about something specific you've done? "I volunteered for the Good Food Institute" or "I donated to the Against Malaria Institute" or "I lobbied my congressperson on pandemic preparedness", anything like that
I'm definitely going to talk about things I've done but with the way that a lot of essay questions are worded it wouldn't work very well. In addition, just saying "I volunteered for X charity because I think they do good work" is unlikely to make me stand out at all, and standing out is really important when it comes to getting into top colleges.