(bright upbeat music)
- Hello everyone. I'm Doctor Steven Mercer,
and I'm a private college counselor
helping students and families
find great colleges to apply to.
I'm also an instructor in the online
College Counseling Certificate Program,
at the University of California, San Diego extension.
I wanna talk to you today about a topic
that I think about a lot
when I'm helping students write their essays
for their college applications.
And today I wanna talk about the personal statement,
and to try to give you some realistic
advice grounded in the idea that
you don't have to write the most amazing,
stressful, unique, personal statement.
And so, a lot of advice that I hear out there
when I go online and I read other advice,
and see what other college counselors are saying,
a lot of it I disagree with because I see that
there's a tendency for people to think
that they have to write a personal statement
that is designed for an absolute superstar.
And I'm here to tell you that for the most part,
you really can write a great personal statement
in your essay for your application,
that can be honest, clear,
and it doesn't have to be the most
award-winning piece of literature ever.
And you'll still have great opportunities
to get in some great colleges.
So first, what is a personal statement?
The personal statement is often
the college application essay
that you you'll hear many people talk about.
And it differs depending on the college,
on what the application asks for.
But in general, many colleges and universities
in the United States ask for one main essay
that's about 500 to 600 words,
it's asking for new information.
Remember, your college application already has a lot
it has GPA, it may have test scores.
It has an extracurricular activity list,
letters of recommendation,
a whole bunch of detailed information about
where you go to school, where you live,
if you've gone to different schools, et cetera.
So the personal statement
is an opportunity for you to share
something that is not in any other part of the application.
And that's something really important to keep in mind.
That you wanna try to avoid repeating
something that is very apparent in your transcript,
or repeating something that you've already put
in your list of activities.
Try to take a different tack.
The idea is to keep it simple.
A simple story about you as a person
that shows something about your personality and your values.
So there's a lots of myths around the personal statement.
One of the myths is that you have to write
a killer personal statement.
It has to be a story or a topic that is a tear-jerker.
It has to be dramatic, and it has to be 100% unique.
I remember I once had a student say to me,
that they absolutely were committed to the idea that
they wanted to get a personal statement topic
that when the first admission officer read it,
that they stood up, and they walked down the hallway
in the office telling everybody about
the most amazing personal statement that they ever read.
Well, that's a myth and that's just not true.
Now, if somebody has a remarkable,
one-of-a-kind story to tell,
then they should tell that story.
But that's just not realistic for
the overwhelming vast majority of people.
In fact, for most adults I know in life where we've lived,
lots of different phases of our lives,
we've had lots of time to rack up experiences.
You'd figure most adults would have
a remarkable tear-jerking story to tell, most of us don't.
So the real truth is,
your personal statement should be just a simple story.
It should just touch on one part of your personality.
You don't need to capture everything in your life.
The more focused, and in some ways the more mundane,
and boring you topic is the better.
There's another one really big myths that I hear out there
that I really disagree with,
and I wanna try to discuss with you.
And that is, that there are taboo topics,
there are topics that you should never write about.
And that there are many of these
and that if you write about any of these, so the myth goes,
"You've doomed your application".
And those might be things like,
Don't write about sports.
Don't write about politics.
Don't write about mental health issues.
And don't write about some students have
a great opportunity to do a mission experience
or a volunteer experience in another part of the world.
And many consultants and college counselors
will advise you don't write about those.
Well, I understand a little bit about
why that myths are out there.
But the truth is,
there are very few true taboo topics.
Of course, there are topics and ideas
that should never be in a college application,
and if they are, they will doom a student's applicant.
I will, I have seen this before
as a College Admission Officer,
I've seen this before as a College Counselor.
And that is, anything that expresses hatred, violence,
or intolerance towards anyone else, or even the world.
Those should never be included in a college application.
Now, the other things to avoid in your topic
are predictable topics.
What do I mean by predictable?
Well if you remember, one of the myths
that I had pointed out was that,
some people think you should never write about sports.
Well, I disagree, but here's what may happen
if you choose to write about your sports activity
as a high school student.
It may be something that's important to you as a student.
You may have participated in sports
a lot as a high school student.
And there are lots of great values
and experiences and lessons to have been learned
by being a student athlete in high school
that colleges would like to hear about.
Because they want those kinds
of students on their campus too.
But here's what might happen
with a college essay about sports.
It becomes too predictable because
student may choose to write about, for example,
the final game in the last season championship.
It's raining, there's thunder,
they're behind by 10 points or more.
You're injured, and there's just no possible way
that you or your team that's the underdog
could possibly come through
and make it win and save the day.
And that's the setup for a lot of essays
that I see a lot about sports.
Well, here's how it's predictable.
The ending of the essay is very obvious
to some admission officers.
That student might tell the story that
despite all odds they persevered,
they fought through the pain, and they rallied and won.
And that's a predictable ending.
Now, I've had many students write that essay,
and write a great essay
and have a great admission results, why?
Because they don't make it about the predictable ending,
they tell that story,
they tell how they may have indeed won the day,
but then they really use it as an opportunity.
In fact, most of the essay is,
about what they learned from that experience,
and how it wasn't necessarily a foregone conclusion.
And how there were other lessons maybe more subtle,
and personal that they learned from that experience.
In fact, a more interesting essay would be
when the student didn't save the day as an athlete
and what making yourself vulnerable
when realizing maybe you lost a competition might look like.
That's just an example from sports,
there's lots of ways that essays can become too predictable,
and I would encourage you to stay away from those.
The bottom line is, the topic that you choose to write on
is not the most important thing.
It does require some good thought,
you have to have a topic that sets itself up
for something you can write on,
in a clear, authentic way.
But it's not the topic that is
of most interest to the admission office.
What's most interesting is how you write about it
and how you can share one or two personal insights
that you gained from an experience,
no matter what the topic is.
I've seen students write wonderful essays
from simple, mundane topics that they just worked through
and explained in writing in a clear and natural way.
So that really begs the question
okay, well, how do colleges
really evaluate these essays?
So for the most part, evaluating essays,
is a subjective process most of the time.
And what I mean by that is, some colleges and universities
read college application essays in the application,
znd it's not a subjective process.
There is an objective, clear rubric,
or scale or grading of some sort
that they give to those essays.
That is where most colleges and universities
read an essay as a human being does
to determine what their personal
subjective reaction might be.
Now, how the admission office
has that subjective reaction varies widely.
Admission officers are different people.
They've majored in different things in college.
They are different ages.
They have been working in different fields
in admission, outside of admission,
for a long time, a short time.
You have admission officers who studied biology,
you have admission officers,
who've studied English literature
and pride themselves on being fine.
Kind of sewers of excellent writing
and love reading their essays and critiquing them,
as though they're a reading a fine book or article.
It varies widely, there's no one clear idea
of who your audience is.
So the bottom line that I give to students is,
you have to determine, is your essay well-written?
Is it clear, and does it reflect
the best writing that you can give?
Well, so that begs the question,
what is a well-written essay, right?
If I've just told you before
that it's a very subjective experience,
because admission officers are different people
reading it with different ideas
and different preconceptions,
how do you know you've got a well-written essay?
Well, first, your personal statement has to be
organized in a clear and simple fashion.
If you don't have a clear outlined to your essay,
if you don't know where paragraph one
is leading to paragraph two, is leading to paragraph three.
Or if you don't have a clear beginning,
middle, and end to your essay, if it rambles.
If it doesn't follow from one to another,
it's not going to hold up to most
Admission Officer's scrutiny.
That essay needs to be clear.
Keep this in mind, Admission Officers read
hundreds, if not thousands of essays every year.
When they're reading your essay,
they may be in the middle of a cycle
of reading hundreds and thousands of essays.
The truth is, is they're doing their best
to read that essay carefully but they're also tired.
And they're reading multiple applications.
If that essay isn't structured in a clear, simple way,
the truth is, you're probably gonna lose
the interest of the Admission Officer pretty quickly.
Now, another simple step is to make sure that
you've edited your essay with a final draft,
with attention to proper grammar, punctuation,
and again a flow of ideas that anyone could read.
But that really obvious,
but this essay is designed for an edited draft,
not one version not second version.
Frequently, you have to write five or six versions
of your personal statement.
You should write it yourself,
it has to be in the authentic voice of a student,
but you get to have editors look at it.
Teachers, counselors,
family, friends, not too many.
don't have people rewrite your essay for you,
get sparing advice,
If you are not paying careful attention to grammar,
then ask someone to read for grammar.
But the most important thing is
essays need to be written
in the authentic voice of a high school student.
Now, that seems obvious to a lot,
but I can't tell you over the years
that I've been working in college admission,
how many times I've heard an Admission Officer
plea to students, but the most important thing to them
is they simply want an essay,
that sounds like it was written by a high school student.
Now, what does that mean?
It means that high school students,
whether they're strong writers or weak writers,
whether they love writing or hate writing,
in general, are gonna sound different than an adult.
Or they're gonna sound different
from someone who works in a certain field.
College Admission Officers know
when an essay has been written by somebody else.
They know when a paragraph has certain words
or even a sentence has a phrase
that just doesn't sound right to them.
It doesn't sound like a typical high school
may have written this.
I really encourage you to avoid it.
Adults, if you are reading
your student's college application essays,
and you attempted to change it,
because you think you could write it a better way,
don't do it because college admission officers know
when it sounds like somebody else has
meddled too much in the essay.
Editing for grammar, punctuation,
big, big, big, unclear passages,
absolutely, you should do that.
But let the essay stand
in the original voice of the student.
My final advice to you is to think about
the words of novelists who I admire a lot,
Elmore Leonard who wrote in a great book
in giving lots of different pieces of advice
to prospective novelists.
One of the pieces of advice was,
"If it sounds like writing, rewrite it".
And what I mean by that is
very often students try to go into essay mode,
and they try to make their writing sound like
something super intelligent or super analytical,
or it makes it sound like
it's not a naturally written piece of writing.
It doesn't sound like somebody
was just having a an authentic, clear conversation.
There is one thing I can put my finger on it,
but I trust Elmore Leonard's advice,
that if you read your own essay
and it just sounds like a well-crafted piece,
maybe consider rewriting it.
So that's my advice to you for writing
a personal statement that'll give you a great opportunities
to apply to a lot of great colleges,
but just for mere mortals.
Thanks now. (bright upbeat music)