Signal from the Noise: An Effective Personal Statement Begins With Understanding What Colleges Really Want
Do a little digging into the online keywords students are searching for when considering application essays, and you’ll see a clear winner: essay examples. They want to see what’s been successful for their peers; they want inspiration, a framework to copy and hang their own story on. And many essay consultants oblige with examples from their star students (cherry picked from thousands of “lesser” essays) — beautifully written tiny memoirs, full of insight and striking imagery, honed and edited to perfection.
Is this helpful? I doubt it. Most obviously, it’s someone else’s story and the whole point of writing a personal statement is that it’s, well, personal. A one-off. An original. And if the student found that essay online and admired its clever structure and had the thought they can adapt it to their own experience, they should know that thousands and thousands of other students have likely had similar thoughts.
Any admissions reader will tell you that reading many, many back-to-back personal statements develops in them a subconscious, almost superhuman ability to recognise patterns and similarities. If your essay sounds weirdly like another they read recently, it will immediately be asterisked in their mind.
What is useful? I’d argue the best place to start is putting yourself in the chair of an admission reader and thinking realistically about why you’re being asked to submit an essay in the first place. Fortunately, this information is also online if you know the right places to look. Here are three sources of unvarnished advice that will start you off on the right track.
One. The topic you write about doesn't really matter (they've heard it all before).
This is taken from a blog by Rick Clark, who is the Executive Director of Strategic Student Access at Georgia Tech. Rick has written a lot of unusually candid blogs about the admission process. Here, he drives home the point that the topic of the essay doesn’t really matter - because a seasoned admission pro will probably have read some version of it before. If the topic doesn’t make a difference, how is the student able to distinguish themselves? By their unique voice:
“This is where your voice has to be evident. And like the list of extracurricular activities, it needs to be clear in the first sentence or two. I know many readers who read the first and last paragraphs and only go back if those are compelling.”
Two. Essentially, the essay is part of a big elaborate job interview (show them you’ll be a successful student and a successful member of the campus community).
The essay coaching company Prompt has some very helpful material on its site reminding students of the core reason they’re being asked to write a personal statement in the first place: schools want to assess the likelihood of the student being a successful member of the student body and school community. It’s so obvious, yet so rarely stated.
Prompt summarizes what success looks like to a college: students who do well in classes and graduate in good time; students who contribute positively to the school community; students who are likely to have a positive impact on whatever professional path they choose in the future; and students who can be particularly helped to achieve their goals by the fit and opportunities offered by the school.
If that seems logical, how do students demonstrate they belong in one of these categories? By demonstrating one or more of five characteristics:
“We’ve identified five traits colleges look for in applicants: drive, intellectual curiosity, initiative, contribution, and diversity of experience.”
It’s a pretty useful framework.
Three. Effective, not perfect essays (tell a story in your own voice that reveals one or two positive characteristics not evident from the rest of your application, and call it good).
The people behind Wow Writing Workshop, Kim Lifton and Susan Knoppow, spend a lot of time talking to the people who make the actual decisions on whether to admit a student to their college or not - the readers and department heads who every year read thousands of application essays as part of selecting an incoming class.
This article by Kim, a former journalist, gathers together the thoughts of several prominent administrators.
Among a few of the takeaways:
Stories don’t have to be dramatic or original if it’s genuinely meaningful to the student.
Treat the essay like an interview — let the reader know who you really are.
Answer the prompt — you can actually stand out by doing that very basic thing.
Kim offers her own observation after years in the industry:
“I have discovered that whether admissions officers work at large, small, public, private or Ivy schools, they want the same thing, no matter how they use them.
And what is that?
Admissions want reflective stories, written by the student, in the voice of a 17-year-old student.”
