Personal Statement: ADHD, pretentiousness, self-consciousness etc.

KLAM666
Sat, 23 Nov 2013 17:39:18 +0000

Don’t use it as an excuse to belittle yourself and ask for pity points. Firstly, your introduction paragraph is poorly written. It looks like you went to dictionary.com and used the thesaurus on every single word. (i.e. "There is a slight cognitive dissonance that arises in electing to detail prior circumstances that may have resulted in the impediment of my academic achievement. Part of me feels compelled to attempt to convince the Honors Department that, because of certain conditions and resulting incidents that I have had the misfortune to endure, I should be excluded from the same judgment that will be placed upon other applicants. In other words, I am tempted to describe myself as perhaps being an exception and appeal for leniency. “) <----- that is just a complete no and turn off when i read that. IT’s like saying " hey. don’t judge me that hard cause i have problems”. Use it in a more positive perspective. As in “because of this disorder, I have learned…”. People wont pity you. They are supposed to view applications fairly and accordingly without any bias. So the fact that you are using it as an excuse is poorly managed. Again, too wordy. Almost makes it difficult o understand. AND apart from that, there are many grammatical errors and misuse of vocabulary. Kind of what happens when you use synonyms for every other word. I’m not trying to be mean, rather, educate you to write improve your chances.

So to sum it up:

1. Don’t thesaurus every other word. People tend to get overly dramatic with it and it ends up not making any sense.

2. Don’t go for pity points, it won’t work. Make it a more positive thing. IF you can’t embrace your disorder and learn to accept that you have challenges that you need to sort out on your own, then how can any admissions accept you?

3. Keep the essay simple. No one has time to read your long words. They only have about 2 minutes to read over your application. If you give them something that they constantly have to say “wait what did i just read” they wont go back to re-read it, tey’ll jsut move on ad skip over a point you are trying to make.