What do I Write for my Personal Statement?

The August 15, 2022 edition of The New Yorker has this comic with the caption “Someday, you will turn this crippling loss into a really triumphant college essay.” More recently, there’s a new term and trend (readers can google it for yourselves): The rise of the “trauma essay.”

A new student, frustrated that I turned down his ideas to write something that will end up as a brag sheet, said “but it seems like you are telling me to write a sob story, and I do not have that type of experience.”

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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.