What do I Write for my Personal Statement?
The August 15, 2022 edition of The New Yorker has a comic of a sad child who has apparently lost a soccer match, and the mother was trying to comfort him. The caption reads, “Someday, you will turn this crippling loss into a really triumphant college essay.” This caption epitomizes what is called the “trauma essay” where students write about failure or sad stories from their lives.
Every year, I get students or parents who tell me that they have had a good life, and have no “trauma” to write about. My answer is always that one’s personal statement can be about (almost) anything, not necessarily a sob story.
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I have previously blogged that the personal statement is NOT a brag sheet. However, it’s also not a sob story or excuse letter either. Yes, you can write about losses, failures and challenges; but in addition to what you are hearing through the grapevine that the focus should be how you have grown from it, it’s also the writing style and the allusions to a wealth of other knowledge incorporated to show a colorful personality.
It’s not WHAT you write about, but HOW you write it that will make an essay stand out.
(That’s why I still have my job!)
My students’ essays are never just a triumphant narration of what crippling losses they went through. A recent student framed her family’s limited financial means into a love story. A handicap can be turned into a story of independence, injected with many humorous vignettes. A devastating loss in a competition that one has trained years for can become a story of passion for the sport, with bloody toes and strict diets adding to the charm of the essay. No sob stories there.
Instead of worrying about what you should write about, spend time polishing the writing style and weave in evidence of your depth of thought and width of knowledge. The admissions readers have so many “life stories” to read. One story often gets meshed into others. How do you stand out? It’s often HOW you write, especially if your crippling loss is merely in a (inconsequential) soccer match.
