I don't specifically recognise this argument as having been put forward by anyone in particular: but I'm having trouble seeing why it's supposed to be an argument against determinism. If anything, the notion that it is "necessary" to "make free choices" seems to be tending more towards compatibilism: that is, the theory that determinism and free choices are both real, and that they can comfortably coexist together. Determinism doesn't imply that you should "just sit there expecting all the events leading up to this situation to make this decision for you". Rather, it implies that those past events will cause you to make a certain decision. The decision itself might be predetermined, but that doesn't take away the fact that you are the person who is formulating it. By contrast, if things are indeterministic, wouldn't the right attitude be to say: there's no way of predicting what I'm about to do, because my behaviour doesn't fit into the normal causal structure of events, so I'm just going...

First of all, I'm inclined to say that, if I was to read that in someone's university application, I would rather admire the applicant, not only for their boldness but also for the evidence it would provide that they were the kind of person who just naturally approached things in a philosophical way. I wouldn't actually agree with the sentiment, and I would look forward to exploring it with the candidate in an interview. But, when you're still at the stage of applying to university, you can't be expected to have all the answers already: the important thing is that you're sensitive to the questions. The concept certainly isn't nonsense: it is an objection that has been raised several times, over the centuries, against philosophers who were committed to rigid theories of pre-determination. For an example, I might quote the late seventeenth century French philosopher, Pierre Bayle -- who was certainly no fool! -- in his critique of Spinoza. Spinoza had argued for a deterministic system in his book, ...