What my students admitted to top-tier schools* wrote in their personal statements (Part 2)
* The students mentioned here received admission offers from many top-rated colleges including (in alphabetical order): Boston U, Duke, Emory, Northwestern, Tulane, UMich, UPenn, WashU St Louis etc.
I have an older blog post of the same title. I have gotten some queries and requests for help with essays from readers who have read that post. Since it has been beneficial to some, I thought I’d share more.
Part 2 is a compilation of more examples of what more recent students have written. I must qualify this post that while the personal statement plays an important role in admission outcomes, there are many other factors at play, including and not limited to academic strength of the students, institutional policies of the colleges and extracurriculars. I also have to add that it’s not the “topic” but how one presents one’s story that matters more in a college essay. So, I will write a bit about how my students and I decided on how to present their stories.
Case 1: From bunny rescue to a series of resilience in challenges
M. and her parents really wanted to inject childhood stories and family life events in her essay. Over a few sessions of brainstorming, I suggested that the story of how she rescued a bunny could be an anchor to bring in other parts of her life, and how through a series of different challenging events, she worked to rescue her academics, a school club, and an unfortunate accident with a family member. Using the events as the backdrop, she wrote about a series of “rescue stories,” with her sense of humor, diligence and resilience as the highlights.
Case 2: A parent’s illness
Many students often wonder if it’s alright to write about a disability or a family member’s health situation. It is important to note that one should never make one’s personal statement a sob story. Student T. has a unique family situation in that one parent has a debilitating illness. That is something close to his heart, and something that defines and affected a big part of his life and even character.
My job as an essay coach and that’s the fun part of my job, is to find an interesting angle to approach any, (yes, any!) topic. When writing on a topic like this one, there’s a risk to lapse into what’s the usual: what the illness it, how one is affected and how one overcame the challenges. Well, that would have been a boring personal statement. Instead, we used the approach of a daily/weekly life format to outline what the student does in a day, in a week. From the "schedule” approach, we weave in the absent parent, and instead of highlighting the sickness, we make use of the parent’s absence in contexts when a parent should be present to hint at the severity of the illness.
Case 3: Childhood loneliness & how it affected his current extracurriculars
Student L used a simple linear progression style of writing to talk about how as a child, his parents were often not around due to work commitments. He wanted to highlight how that part of his childhood shaped who he is. While the narrative is sort of linear, from childhood to teenage years, we added a twist by using some developmental psychology to show how he is resourceful inspite of the lack of parental attention. The latter part of the essay was about his extracurriculars with throwbacks to the influences of a lonely childhood.
Case 4: Central metaphor to hold different milestones together
Student Z wanted to include some significant milestones in the past 17 years of his life. From being co-author on a paper published in a peer-edited journal to having fundraised close to a million dollars, this student does have some interesting things in his life. But, in the context of college admissions to top-tier colleges today, those are not going to stand out in and of themselves. (There’s a saying/joke that one needs to have found a cure for cancer before one can be sure to be admitted to a single-digit acceptance rate college.) Besides, no essay should be a brag sheet, which is a genuine pitfall awaiting essays with this type of content. Instead of the essay becoming a list of milestones, the student came up with a metaphor that threads all the main events in his life together, including failures and lessons as well.
As for what metaphor the essay has, I’d not share here, because remember, everyone’s story is unique. There’s no need to follow any “viral” essay such as the “Costco Essay” or the “I hate the lesson ‘S’” essay. The important thing to note is that you need an approach so that your story will stand out in a pile of 50,000 or more essays.
