I’m looking for general tips to see if I’m overly stressed for perfecting my personal statement.
I have good grades and scores. I’m going for Common App Prompt #7, and I’m going creative and philosophical/abstract. That can be risky, and I don’t want my safeties to reject me because of an unusual personal statement.
I have had people read through my text. General opinions:
Pros:
Thoughtful, reflective, deep thinking skills.
Not cliche, especially the intro paragraph is very well written.
Cons:
Hard to understand / follow
Certain word choices are especially confusing or can be interpreted a wrong way.
Not specific enough.
Sometimes the tone is overly harsh/extreme/radical.
What types of personal statements would get rejected?
If the admin officer can’t easily follow my logic/text, would that get rejected?
If my grades and scores are above average (for my safeties), how likely would a “bad” personal statement ruin the application?
In reality, I think many essays are inflated, embellished, or crafted by adults—whether paid or not—and seldom truly represent the genuine individual or their genuine interests. So, why do colleges still place such importance on essays?
Hard to understand/follow is a pretty big negative that, in the absence of any other information, should be fixed. The other cons are more subjective. Have you used the essay reading service here on CC?
ETA - if an AO cannot understand your essay, by definition it is a bad essay. Will a bad essay hurt you? No one can definitively answer that, since we don’t work for colleges and don’t know which schools you are considering. (It’s less likely to hurt you at a school with an 80% acceptance rate vs one with a 15% rate).
Your essay(s) should be clear, well written and say something about YOU. You do not need to be the next Ernest Hemingway to write a solid college essay - in fact, most college essays are fairly mundane given that they are written by HS students who have limited life experience. I don’t think they are determinative at most schools - particularly at safety schools where they will be admitting mostly on grades/scores. However, AOs want to see that you write well and clearly. I’m not sure where kids get the idea that an essay needs to be obscure or overly precious in order to impress AOs - if anything they’ll be turned off if the essay seems meandering or unclear.
A college essay or personal statement should give the reader insights as to who you are. For the personal statement it should show you how think, your ambition/direction, and your confidence. An essay should show how your thinking has led you to resilience, direction, confidence, or shaped your character. It should be authentic to you. If in doubt, keep your sentences short and make sure that what you write flows logically for the reader.
If you otherwise have a strong app, I’d be more conservative (clear, concise, address the prompt) for matches and low reaches. For high reaches, if you think you have a well written provocative “go big or go home essay”, I’d tend to throw my shot using that to grab the AO’s attention. That seemed to work for my S’s close friend whose essay I reviewed. White, affluent, no hooks, decent but not earth shattering EC’s, top 5% but SAT in mid 1400’s (so avg excellent), admitted Harvard REA. His essay definitely grabbed the reader’s attention.
A recent episode of YCBK addressed this. The opinion was clear that it is not the time for “creative” writing. AOs don’t have time for interpretation. The goal of the essay is not to showcase what and interesting writer you are, but to show who you are as a person, your values, etc.
People who read you essay have only a few minutes. If you can’t write something that make it worthwhile for them to continue, they will likely not read the whole thing, assign a median score to you. Of the 1500-2000 applications they read, no one can audit that they didn’t read your every word. But if the acceptance rate is 5-10% and you didn’t make the cut, you are the one hurting.
What do you mean by this statement! Oh Nevermind…I read the above comments.
I have some expertise in language and use. The concern I have about AI is it takes the “voice” of the person out of the writing. Essays should have the voice of the student submitting them. The reader should have a sense of the writer by doing the reading. I’m concerned that students will try to use AI, and this will take their voice out of the writing.
Yes, I agree with @michaelcollege that a good essay reader can spot an essay that has been “edited” significantly in terms of content…and certainly one that has an AI feel. Just recently on this site, a poster used AI to explain what his essays were about, and several posters inquired about this post…because it was so obviously different than most of the other posts the writer had done. They said they used AI because they felt it explained their essay content better than they could (). It was easy to spot. AI has its place, but it shouldn’t take the place of actual thinking when writing an essay…in my opinion.
An international student told me he uses a “rephraser” for his essays. The essays are better when he doesn’t.
I also note some cultural differences in ethics concerning essays. I had two students ask me for help with the same essay, and it turned out they were best friends! It is also considered okay to include some fiction when, say, writing about challenges. I have been discussing all this with students and they tell me that in their country copying and forging and all kinds of practices that we might consider unethical are quite common and even accepted. There is an “end justifies the means” attitude. Not sure that this is any worse than the excessive coaching (and even rewriting) that people pay high prices for here in the US.
While I think some practices we find unethical or borderline may be common, I doubt that forgery/fraud are accepted, except in these students’ minds (ok as long as I don’t get caught). In high pressure/high stakes countries like Japan, Korea, China and Taiwan, there are the occasional scandalous headline stories of cheating of various stripes, so it really is not ok even if it might be common.
I didn’t want to mention specific countries. One student has repeatedly thanked me for “teaching him about integrity.” I stopped working with the two best friends who used the same essay, and explained that it was not something I could support.
Even in the US, I occasionally run across students who seem to think a certain amount of cheating on tests, plagiarism/AI in essays, and so on is normal.
So I would hesitate to generalize about other countries, since in the one country I know best, there do not seem to be consistent norms. But I similarly can totally believe at least some students in many, maybe most, maybe all countries would think some cheating on college applications was normal.
I agree @NiceUnparticularMan. My reference to other countries was mainly just about communications with students whose essays I am reviewing. I know from my own kids just how prevalent cheating is here! Back to the original program Sorry for the tangent!
College admission is about weighing institutional priorities (athletics, legacy, class balance and make up, yield) and curating from the applicants pool. The more data AOs are given, whether in the form of school profile, gpa, class ranks, awards, test scores, ECs, or essays, the more informed their decision can be.
Besides inventing ECs and other achievements in Varsity Blues’ style, recommendations and essays can be the most biased part of the application data set, because it can be subject to a broad range of external support, from school teachers, friends, parents, chatGPT, online consultants, private consultants, to expert college essay ghost writers. The very fact that these services are marketed, means there is demand for it, and it’s certainly being used in decent volume. Does every applicant need a dedicated essay consultant to write an exceptional essay? Absolutely not. Can an excellent ghost writer for hire write every essay for an applicant whose writing skills are the weakest relative to his/her academic profile and substantially increase the probability of admission, absolutely.
Every single aspect of a college application can be enhanced by outside, paid support. Whether it is a private SAT tutor or paid essay coach, all things can be enhanced by a paid professional, if you have the resources and desire. In our area, SAT tutors or prep classes are the most typical “extras” people pay for. Worrying about it is a waste of time.
But I would also suggest this is kinda missing the forest for the trees. The biggest single source of support for optimizing college applications, by far, is your actual school, and after that are your parents. And of course these things fit together because who your parents are can help determine where you go to school.
People can mean different things by bias, but to be very blunt about it, no one “earns” their parents, good or bad. It is just the luck of the draw. And if your parents either lack the will or the ability to support your college applications as much as someone else’s parents, including through which school they send you to, that is going to matter way, way more than things like tutors and such in the end. Which are really just a few more things your parents may or may not give you.
And that applies to essays too. Highly selective colleges keep telling you to be yourself, but then they are also looking for your essays to show you will fit well at their college both academically and socially and so on. And then the kids who have parents who went to such colleges, and then send their kids to schools that mostly closely resemble those colleges, end up with demonstrably a better hit rate at those colleges even controlling for basic academic qualifications. And that is because those kids have a huge advantage in terms of being themselves and also being the sort of kid those colleges will have confidence in, because they have been practicing for that their whole lives.
And to be very clear, I am not blaming the kids, the parents, or the colleges for any of this. They are all operating in a context of how our society does education that starts well before the colleges get involved, and none have the power to change all that on their own.
But if we are going to be serious about identifying which sources of support are most important to admissions to college, it makes zero sense to me to define away by far the most important such sources. Even if there is nothing to be done about it, we should at least be honest about it.
Absolutely. My kids have had a lot of inborn advantages just because they’ve grown up in a UMC town and attended quality public schools and have parents who care about their education. That’s much more determinative than having a private college counselor or paying someone to help with your essay etc. I just don’t think it is worth worrying about kids who are accessing the paid services - it is what it is. Top college admissions favors well to do people in ways big and small and stuff like SAT tutors is the least of it.
). It was easy to spot. AI has its place, but it shouldn’t take the place of actual thinking when writing an essay…in my opinion.
Sorry for the tangent!