At Gurufi, we help applicants of all backgrounds write powerful and compelling personal statements, but if I had to pick our specialty, it would be helping people with blemishes on their record. Maybe you had a bad first year in college; maybe you got arrested when you were 19; maybe you founded a company right out of college that went bankrupt and lost your investors a ton of money. We’ve seen it all. In nearly every case, we’re dealing with people who stumbled, got up, and rebuilt their lives informed -and even powered by- the lessons they learned from their mistakes.
As you look to build your personal statement or write about a blemish in your past, here are five tips to follow:
Be sincere: When discussing flaws in your history in your personal statement, it’s crucial to be sincere and upfront. Don’t speak in vague terms or euphemisms. Being direct, clear, and frank can demonstrate maturity and self-awareness and assist you in giving the reader a more accurate and genuine picture of who you are.
Consider the lessons you’ve learned: When writing about previous transgressions, take into account the lessons you’ve learned and how they’ve helped you become a better person. This might show that you’re able to grow from your mistakes and make progress. A good rule of thumb is that you should look for a 2:1 ratio (lesson learn to describing the mistake) when talking about missteps.
Don’t concentrate on the bad: While it’s vital to acknowledge and talk about previous mistakes, you should try to avoid focusing on the bad parts of the event. Instead, concentrate on the advantages of your development and progress. Make it clear how / why you’re a better person. If you can, provide an example of an instance where you faced a similar challenge and crushed it.
Give particular instances: Give specific examples to support your views and to assist explain the lessons you’ve learnt from prior mistakes. This can enhance your writing’s vividness and interest, as well as assist the reader remember your personal statement longer.
Keep it short: It’s always a good idea to eliminate unnecessary text, but it’s 10x important to keep this section lean and direct. Be succinct and to the point while writing about flaws in your history. Stay away from delving into too much detail or focusing on the unpleasant parts of the encounter. Instead, concentrate on your main points and leave it at that.
For more help with your personal statement, check us out at Gurufi.com. Our personal statement editors and consultants have decades of experience helping clients get into top Masters and Ph.D. programs in STEM, humanities, fine arts, and social sciences. Our specialty is helping you craft compelling personal statements that move the needle in your admissions process! For questions, shoot us an email at service@gurufi.com. Check us out on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Writing a powerful personal statement can be a genuine challenge for inexperienced writers. They often pile on unnecessary complexity, use fancier-than-needed words, and try too hard to *dazzle* their reader. Don’t do that. The best writing is simple, clear, and direct. It will also feel more authentic and allow you to connect with your reader on a human level.
There are many summations of the Hemingway Rules, but I like this one from the University of Chicago’s International Association of Business Communicators. 1. USE SHORT SENTENCES Short sentences are easier to digest. They make it easier to follow each point of an argument or story. Your job as a writer — or editor — is to make life easy for your audience. Forcing the reader to navigate through a bunch of long, complex sentences is like forcing him/her to hack through the jungle with a machete. Create a nice, tidy path with plenty of short sentences.
2. USE SHORT FIRST PARAGRAPHS
3. USE VIGOROUS ENGLISH Copywriter David Garfinkel describes it like this: “It’s muscular, forceful (writing). Vigorous English comes from passion, focus and intention.” This rule is really a reminder to do your homework and fully understand what you are writing about. It is impossible to write with “passion, focus and intention” without having a real grasp of the subject. In most cases, if you’ve done your homework, you will write with authority and vigor.
4. BE POSITIVE, NOT NEGATIVE Basically, “be positive” means you should say what something is rather than what it isn’t. — Instead of saying something is “inexpensive,” say it is “affordable.” — Instead of describing something as “unclear,” say it is “confusing.” This might seem like a small point, but it’s actually quite important. Being “positive” makes your writing more direct. Whether they realize it or not, readers are turned off by “roundabout writing.”
So, there you have it: eminently practical writing tips from one of the masters — or more accurately, from the Kansas City Star. “Those were the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing,” Hemingway said in 1940. “I’ve never forgotten them. No man with any talent, who feels and writes truly about the thing he is trying to say, can fail to write well if he abides with them.”
For more help with your personal statement, check us out at Gurufi.com. Our personal statement editors and consultants have decades of experience helping clients get into top Masters and Ph.D. programs in STEM, humanities, fine arts, and social sciences. Our specialty is helping you craft compelling personal statements that move the needle in your admissions process! For questions, shoot us an email at service@gurufi.com. Check us out on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
After collaborating with hundreds of business school applicants over the past 15 years, one thing that I have learned is that there are many paths to an MBA. Often, these paths are bumpy, circuitous, or unconventional. Yesterday, I had the pleasure of talking to a group of applicants on GMATClub’s YouTube Live broadcast, and I decided to focus that talk on how to overcome blemishes or even big problems in your application.
Midway through, a funny thing happened! My kids escaped from the playroom and decided to investigate what Dada was doing… several times! Like many of you, all of us at Gurufi.com have had to adjust our lives to the realities of COVID-19. Our office in Portland closed because of local restrictions, so we’re all working remotely from home. As my kids ran in (repeatedly) to see what was going on, it occurred to me that this was an excellent lesson for the kinds of challenges we face in life: randomness intervenes, complications arise, family situations suddenly require our attention.
I hope you’ll check out this presentation because it gives some handy advice for how you can account for setbacks, blemishes, and disasters in your life within the context of your Personal Statement. We also touch on how to write a powerful “biggest failure” essay that some schools ask for. The TLDR is:
• You shouldn’t run from your mistakes if it’s something that the admissions committee will know. You need to provide the frame for how they view this.
• “If you can’t fix it, feature it.” For big mistakes, think about how you can contextualize the setback within the broader scope of your life and career in a way that depicts it, not as a failure, but as the first act in a story of success.
• Admissions committees understand that people aren’t perfect. Find ways to make them see you holistically.
If you have questions for Brian, send him a line at service@gurufi.com.
For help with your Personal Statement or other admissions writing, check us out at Gurufi.com! We have a fantastic group of experienced editors and consultants ready to make your application shine!
Letters of recommendation are a vital part of your application, but people often don’t treat the process like it! Even though your recommender is doing the writer, you still have real work to do in order to make sure that it is a strong letter that advances your candidacy. Here are some hints and insights on letters of rec.
If you are applying to a PhD program, it’s important to understand how the admissions process works once your application gets sent. Many people offering expertise on admissions writing come from the world of undergraduate, business school, or law school admissions, but these areas of expertise are of very limited usefulness when it comes to understanding how to approach an application to a doctoral program. To be blunt: while some basic concepts are portable, on the whole an admissions strategy built upon a business school or undergraduate model puts you at an acute disadvantage.
Below are four factors that will help you understand how to approach your graduate school application. For additional questions or to get help with your graduate school personal statement or positioning, be sure to check us out at Gurufi.
1. Professors are the AdCom. Unlike colleges, law schools, and business schools, graduate school departments don’t have dedicated staff whose only full-time position is selecting the incoming class. In most departments, the Admissions Committee is composed of professors in that department, sometimes supplemented by one or a few advanced graduate students or postdocs. As such, you can be assured that you are interacting with high-level experts who understand your subject with comprehensive sophistication and granularity. These means a few things: a) you can feel a bit more free to use jargon; b) you need to know the department’s strengths; c) you should figure out where your department’s professors stand on controversial topics within your field so that you don’t step on toes; and d) you need to write as though you understand the field yourself and are ready, on day one, to do advanced work within it. This last point is really vital. Unlike business school applicants, who don’t need to spend time in their essay discussing the scholarship on, say, leadership, investment, or corporate structures, you need to have at least a paragraph (and probably more) in your essay where you’re engaging with the core questions within the field you’re studying.
2. Grades are important, BUT… One of the things to keep in mind is that departmental admissions committees have a great deal of latitude to admit whomever they want. In fact, except in rare cases, the overall graduate school admissions boards tend just to rubber-stamp the choices made by particular departments. As such, particular departments don’t have concerns about, for instance, maintaining an overall GPA average for the admitted class; they just want to pick the best people who fit the culture and academic strengths. What this means is that, while grades are very important, they’re not the be-all and end-all of doctoral admissions. I recall one instance of a student, who is now a professor at a very prominent West Coast university who had a 1.8GPA in college, but went on to work as a lab tech where he fell in love with neuroscience and in his free time began studying up on the subject. A few years later, he was making substantive contributions to the research of the lab and his advisor urged him to apply for doctoral programs. His advisor wrote him a compelling letter of recommendation that detailed his accomplishments and, despite his disastrous four years of college, was admitted into a dozen of the top doctoral programs, including Harvard and UCSF.
Also, do keep in mind that many departments have different ways of calculating GPA. When I was on the Admissions Committee, we were given a form that included “relevant GPA,” which excluded any grades from the first 1.5 years of college. This is based on pretty sound research suggesting that grades in the first three semesters of a student’s undergraduate career are mostly correlated with the quality of their high school, and not long-term success or ability. This may have changed since, but when I applied to graduate schools, about half of the top programs either didn’t even ask my freshman year grades (there was no spot on the form for them), or I later discovered that the packets produced by the department secretaries simply excluded this information. This can be a huge relief to people who might have stumbled out of the gates but found their academic stride later.
3. The AdCom is very concerned about “fit.”
When the committee met, one of the most frequent conversations that we had about a candidate is whether they were a good fit. This is important for two different reasons. First, the AdCom wants to know if you will actually attend if admitted. Most graduate school cohorts are quite small (usually fewer than 25 people, often fewer than 10), and once admissions are offered, the tables turn a bit and it becomes a scramble for departments to recruit the admitted applicants they see as the top students. So, if the committee is confident you’ll attend, they’re slightly more likely to offer admission to you. This is doubly true if a school perceives that it’s your “safety school.” In my case, I was admitted into all of the top-8 programs I applied to, but didn’t get into the #24-ranked program. I don’t know for certain, but I think it was likely because the committee didn’t think I would go if offered a slot. With this in mind, if there is a school that is absolutely your top choice, say that in your essay or in other communications with the department. BUT, don’t say this to more than one school. First, it’s lying; and second, these professors talk to each other, and there’s a too-high-to-risk-it chance that your rouse will be discovered.
The other way that fit becomes an issue is in discussions about whether your intended area of scholarship actually fits in with what that department does. Note that this is partly linked to the discussion I just referenced, in that we often had conversations that went like, “Jane is interested in applied legal theory, but Stanford’s department is better at that. She’s likely to go there…” But, it was often just a more general assessment of where the candidate might fit in within the department. It’s important to note that sometimes this is a function of how many advisees the professor who would likely serve as your advisor already has.
4.Your potential advisors are consulted… If the committee looks at your application and says, “oh, Jane would likely work under Prof. Sarah,” then do note that Prof. Sarah may be contacted about your application. And, if you do mention (which you ABSOLUTELY should) a professor under whom you are interested in working, the committee will usually contact that professor about your application. Having them say, “yes, Jane’s ideas are interesting and I could work with her” is quite useful for your application. This is why it’s really important to contact your potential advisors before you apply (a VERY brief email + a request for a coffee or telephone call) so that they have the heads-up on your application. Sometimes, they might tell you that they’re not taking graduate students or that you’re not what they’re looking for. This can be disappointing, but it allows you to reframe your admissions strategy accordingly by either selecting other professors or simply scratching that school off your list.
You see that the admissions process for PhD programs is quite different than that used in law schools or business schools. There are additional steps that you need to take and additional things that you need to be cognizant of. It’s its own kind of process, and as such if you decide to get help with your application or with your personal statements, then you need to choose someone who’s aware of how this all works. At Gurufi, all of our consultants and editors have graduated from elite graduate programs and we have experience serving on graduate admissions committees so we know the idiosyncrasies of this process quite well.
Over at Gurufi.com., we’re putting together a short series of videos on how you can use effective storytelling techniques to make your personal statement more engaging. We decided to create this series in order to combat what is the most prevalent problem that I encounter when helping people organize, write, and revise their personal statements: bland essays that feel like narrative versions of the author’s CV.
Many people resort to this style of writing because they either don’t understand what makes for a compelling essay or they’re convinced that they don’t know how to write a good story. To the first point, what I can tell you after having read literally thousands of admissions essays is that the best essays are essays that tell a story. Rather than looking to recount lots of small achievements, they go into depth on just a few (or even one) really important transformative moment. These sorts of stories, when properly deployed, can clarify your positioning as an applicant and make you memorable in a way that a list of accomplishments simply cannot.
So how do you write a compelling story? Well, there are many aspects to this, which our video series will cover, but over the next few weeks, I’ll be describing some of the most important tips and tricks. Today, I’ll start with the most important one: have a good villain. Now, let me be clear about what I’m describing. I’m not telling you to describe a terrible person in your essay, but rather I want you to think about what makes any adventure story or movie good: you have to believe that the good guy might fail. You create stakes by making the obstacle immense, and thus when the hero surmounts it, they show their qualities of strength, guile, intellect, resilience, and maturity.
To use an example, think about the recent two-part “Avengers” movie. In the first part, the villain, Thanos, had to seem invincible, and the audience had to believe that their heroes couldn’t possibly beat him. He was too strong, too smart, and was always two moves ahead of them. Then, when in the second part, the heroes managed to beat him, their story was much more interesting and engaging and the audience was left with far more awe and respect for the heroes.
So how does this apply to writing a personal statement? Far too often, applicants will write about their accomplishments without fully explaining what made those accomplishments so impressive. Take the following examples:
“I led a $15 million purchase of Company A.”
“I spent a month working with HIV orphans in Tanzania.”
“I volunteered for 18 months with a legal aid non-profit.”
If this is all you write, these would be nice additions to your application, but they wouldn’t be fantastic home runs. What these applicants need to do is ask some follow-up questions: 1) why was this work so challenging? 2) What was my hardest day on the job? 3) What was the biggest challenge I faced doing this work? 4) What was the closest I ever came to failing? 5) Why? The applicant could then use these answers to these questions to tell their story in a fuller and more interesting way. For instance:
“I led a $15 million purchase of Company A.”
You can flesh this out by adding some vital points that make clear how hard this was to achieve, such as:
->The deal nearly collapsed because of miscommunication
→ With a midnight deadline looming, I gathered the conflicting parties on a teleconference and worked through each of the sticking points
→ The CEO of the target company refused to budge, and the deal looked dead until I flew to Cincinnati and convinced him to have lunch with me. My coming to his home office established trust, and this laid the foundation for fruitful dialogue that let us complete a win-win deal.
These details, when added thoughtfully into the essay, will make the experience pop off the page in a way that merely describing the end accomplishment could never do.
By going through this process of really focusing on the most difficult and dire moments, you make your contributions stand out and the story becomes both more memorable and a more powerful expression of your strengths as an applicant. The reason is that the reader can feel the difficulty of this situation and recognizes that, but for your efforts, this deal might have failed.
For this reason, I often urge clients never to focus only on the accomplishment. If you feature an accomplishment in an essay, you should first try to make clear why the accomplishment was such a big deal. Your story needs “a villain” to really allow the hero to shine. This “villain” is almost never an actual person / opponent, but rather a set of tough circumstances and unexpected occurrences that you had to overcome, solve, or work around.
Every year, Gurufi.com helps hundreds of applicants get into the school of their dreams. Last year alone, Gurufi clients earned admission into the top business schools in America and around the world, including: Oxford Said, Wharton, Kellogg, Yale School of Management, Harvard Business School, NYU Stern, MIT Sloan, Booth, U Michigan Ross, and Cal Berkeley Haas, to name but a few. For help, visit Gurufi.com or contact them directly at service@gurufi.com
I’ve been working with clients for nearly 15 years, and in that time, I have helped clients fix, tighten, and rework probably 15,000 personal statements. Because I’ve had so many reps, I can instantly spot what I’ve come to call “the Frankenstein Essay.”
These essays are distinctive for their abrupt change of voice, inexplicable jumps between narratives, and the overall sense that I’m not reading a single coherent essay, but rather a weird amalgam pieced together from the parts of five or six different sources. Whenever I get one of these, I’ll ask a client, “so, how many people did you show the first draft of your personal statement to?” Without fail, they’ll tell me that they showed everybody they could think of who might help: their roommate, a professor, the school’s premed / pre-law advisor, etc.
This is a huge mistake.
Look, it’s understandable that once you’ve finished your personal statement, you may feel a little apprehensive about what you have written, and as such it is only reasonable to seek out second and third opinions in order to make sure that you have overlooked nothing, the prose is tight, and you have made a compelling case for your candidacy. But, just as an excellent revision and editing can make an average essay excellent, bad editing can wreck an essay. On such occasions, one is smart to heed the old aphorism that ‘too many cooks spoil the broth.’
Once you have completed your first draft, you need to think carefully about how you go about using advice from other people. Here are six pointers for how to get the best advice in order to turn your draft into an excellent final version you are proud of and happy with.
1.) Be careful about who you pick.
Obviously, you want to get advice from someone who writes well, can be frank with you, and has some understanding of the field to which you are applying. If you choose to get advice from a boyfriend or your mother, for example, then be careful because they might give you an overly glowing review because of their esteem and love for you or may lack the qualifications to point out minor problems with your approach. Similarly, asking your English major friend to look at your Engineering graduate school essay is not a bad idea, but if you go that route, also have someone involved in Engineering (preferably in an academic capacity) also look at your essay is a good idea.
Good people to talk to are your academic advisor (if you are applying to graduate or professional schools) or guidance counselor (if you are applying to college). I know that many people will take their essays to message boards and post them to see what people think of it. This is the one thing I would advise you NEVER to do. The problem here is that you have no real way to gauge someone’s level of expertise and you may get too much feedback from too many sources.
Which leads us to point #2…
2. Don’t give it to too many people.
If you get critiques on your essay from 8–9 different people and you incorporate all of their suggestions, you will be pulled in too many directions and the essay will lose its sense of voice and focus. The old joke that a camel is a horse designed by committee applies here. Your essay cannot be everything to everyone, and you have to accept this fact. There will always be something that someone would have done differently, so they will often naturally advise you that you should do something different than what you are doing.
3. Ask follow-up questions
Whenever someone suggests a change, don’t be afraid to ask them about it. Sometimes you will agree with their rationale but disagree with the execution of the change. Also, through a conversation people will often help you see larger problems that you may have missed. People are often hesitant to give tough advice, and a friendly conversation can help you to avoid this problem because by talking to someone, the person will see that you are serious about valuing their advice.
The most frequent form of advice that people will give is, “you should include _____.” Now, this is often useful advice, but because most personal statements have tight word caps, you can’t just add everything that might kinda-sorta be relevant. Thus, in my experience, one of the best questions you can ask is, “if you think that I should add ____, what do you think I should take out to make room for this new text?”
The reason is that writing is about choices, and just because something is relevant in the abstract doesn’t mean that it should be included in your essay. If their suggestion for what you should remove to make room for their suggested new text is something that you don’t think you can lose, then that may indicate that you should ignore this bit of advice.
Which brings us to Point #4:
4. Don’t be afraid to ignore advice.
At the end of the day, this is *your* personal statement, and *your* future depends on how well you execute it. When someone suggests changes, consider their level of expertise (both as a writer and as a subject-matter expert), think about it carefully and, if you disagree, then don’t do it. Not every piece of advice given is good; often, you will receive terrible advice.
The final decision is yours, so take your role as the gatekeeper of advice seriously, and only let the best suggestions that work well with your theme, tone, approach and goal through.
5. BUT, try to avoid pride of authorship
In my capacity as an admissions essay consultant, I often encounter customers who are furious when I tell them that they have things that they need to work on. It is almost as if they paid me $500 for me to tell them that their work was perfect, and they should not change a single letter.
Because a personal statement is so, well, personal, it can sometimes sting when someone gives you pointed advice. Try to see the bigger picture and embrace the process that will help you to move towards a better and stronger essay. Do your best not to see a critique of your essay as a criticism of you as a person, and rather see it as a positive moment that moves you one step closer to your goal.
They can be a bit expensive, but in the end, if you’re willing to tens -or even hundreds- of thousands of dollars on college or graduate school, spending a small fraction of that to get you into your desired school only makes sense. Getting into a top school, as opposed to an average one, is worth investing in.
Some things to consider:
-Make sure that they guarantee your satisfaction.
-Ask if they will work with you beyond just receiving a single revision back from you. Often, it will take 2–3 exchanges with your editor to completely understand what you want to say, how you want to say it, and what core message you want to convey.
In the end, selecting the right editor / consultant is a personal choice about vibe and fit. We at Gurufi.com and our sister site FourthWrite.com understand that admissions can be a stressful and opaque process, and our editors are fantastic at working with you to produce a powerful essay that reflects your personality and aspirations.
If you’re looking for revision of a single essay that you’ve already written a draft for, check us out at Gurufi.com. If you’ve not yet begun your draft, or if you have many essays as part of a larger application push, we have packages at FourthWrite.com that include consultations designed to help you produce an effective outline, overall positioning, and a compelling final set of essays.
If you questions, shoot me an email at fobi@fourthwrite.com
We are working hard right now to put together our free webinar series on how to write a powerful and compelling story-based personal statement, but while we’re putting the finishing touches on that, I wanted to dispel some misconceptions people might have when I urge them to tell stories. Specifically, they think that I’m telling them to produce fluff content that’s all about personality. Quite the contrary, our method is really focused on the idea of using relevant experiences to tell stories that demonstrate your excellence, readiness, and uniqueness.
So how do people go wrong when they tell stories? Somewhere along the line, people got it in their head that the purpose of a personal statement was to let the reader get to know them. Over and over, I will read a personal statement for medical school or law school in which the author will tell a story that is highly personal to them, but ultimately absolutely irrelevant to their application. When I try to explain that they need to focus on things germane to their application, they will tell me that they want to let the reader know who they are, as if this is a sufficient explanation for a medical school essay that focuses almost exclusively on their love of triathlons or a law school essay that does not ever use the word “law.”
Why does this happen? Essentially, it happens because people get so fixated on writing what they believe will be an interesting essay that makes the applicant sound unique. I hear these words –interesting and unique- all the time, and while they are very important for a compelling essay, they are a means to an end, and not the end itself. The end is simple: convince the reader that you are prepared and qualified for admission. If you succeed in this task and the reader thinks you’re a funny and engaging gal, that’s super. If they don’t, just as well.
Given this, as you write your personal statement, you should keep in mind a simple and well-worn maxim that every salesman has heard a million times: Always Be Closing (ABC). In other words, at every point in the essay, you need to keep in mind whether or not what you are saying is moving the reader closer to believing that you have the requisite knowledge, experience and understanding of the field you hope to enter. So, that really cute and funny story about your high school soccer team? Probably not a good idea to include it because it fails the ABC test.
For every story, for every paragraph and for every sentence, you do need to ask yourself, “what does this say about the strength of my candidacy?” If the best that you can come up with that it says something interesting or unique about you, it doesn’t pass the ABC test. On the other hand, if it shows that you have an important and germane skill or perspective, then it passes the ABC test.
I know that when you have a really great story or if you have done something quite unique, you feel compelled to include that story or fact in your essay. And, with some thought you can frame it in a manner that does link to relevant characteristics that the school is looking for. That said, you should remember that this is more akin to a job interview than a first date. You want to make the reader think you’re qualified, not see you as their future husband or wife. Save the funny stories for your new classmates once you’re admitted.
In the meantime, use stories and examples that emphasize skills and knowledge that are germane and that relate to the field you hope to enter. So, as you write your essay, keep in mind: Always Be Closing.
If you need help writing a powerful story-based personal statement, email Brian at fobi@fourthwrite.com or check out our website Gurufi.com
“I don’t want to brag… I need to find a way to make this a little less about me and what I’ve done….”
I often encounter clients like this one who want to write a powerful personal statement but are concerned that by talking about their accomplishments in glowing ways, they risk coming across as smug or self-impressed. This is an understandable concern because in most areas of your life, if you talk at length about how great you are, you’ll come across as unlikeable and vain. If this is something you’re struggling with, here are five tips and insights to help you navigate the process of talking yourself up in your personal statement.
1. It’s What You’re Supposed to Do! The Admissions Committee is literally asking you to talk about why you’re a prepared and qualified candidate. This isn’t the same as going on about how great your abs are on a first date; this is you responding to a request to produce a compelling reason to admit you. Embrace that this is simply the nature of the beast and put yourself in the mental space to describe yourself in a positive light.
2. If you don’t, nobody will! When the Admissions Committee meets to discuss candidates, you wont’ be in the room. Your only “advocate” will be your admissions packet, so you need to make the case for yourself. Too often, candidates expect AdComs to behave like archaeologists, digging through your application in order to figure out who you are and why you’re great. While most admissions officers are conscientious and thoughtful, they’re not going to do your work for you, so you need to make sure that your essays and other materials make explicit why you are great. If you get sheepish about self-advocacy, you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage.
3. Use Storytelling. Most applicants have heard people tell them “show, don’t tell.” This is an important idea when it comes to accentuating your strengths. If you tell the reader “I am resourceful and smart,” that is both unpersuasive (because it lacks evidence) and also risks coming across as gratuitous self-praise. But, if you tell a story about a time that you demonstrated resourcefulness and intelligence, then you both impact the reader more AND reduce the sense that you are boasting.
4. Show Your Work. Related to that, in the course of telling your story, be thoughtful about the details you provide. The best way to show intelligence, for example, is to provide examples of moments where you solved a really difficult problem. Walk the reader through the nature and scope of the problem and describe if you can why others had failed to solve it. Then, provide details about what you tried, why you eventually succeeded, and what the final outcome was.
5. Show humility by talking about a failure. If you’re still concerned that you’re being a braggart, then one potential approach is to consider infusing some humility into your narrative by talking about a failure or misstep. Now, as I described last week, this still needs to be a “failure” in the sense that it (1) served as a learning experience and (2) taught you lessons that you subsequently deployed in a way that produced an ultimate success.
Big picture, though, what I would encourage you to do is to write from a confident and assertive posture. I appreciate that imposter syndrome is real and that high-performing people often feel the most insecure about their ability and credentials, but in the end, you have to push through this and remember that it’s your job to convince the reader that you’re great. If you won’t, NOBODY else will. Once you’ve turned in your application, you can go back to being the humble self-effacing person you’ve always been. 🙂
Brian is a consultant and editor at Gurufi.com. He works with applicants to sharpen their personal statements and refine applicants’ positioning. Every year, Brian’s clients earn admission into top schools throughout the world. Check him out at Gurufi.com or contact him directly at service@gurufi.com.
Some years back, a Columbia University professor conducted a study that produced some shocking results. In criminal cases, hungry and tired judges handed down sentences far stricter than when they were rested and well-fed. Specifically, as the author explained, “You are anywhere between two and six times as likely to be released if you’re one of the first three prisoners considered versus the last three prisoners considered.” Further, defendants were most likely to receive a positive result at the beginning of the day, when judges were presumably most rested and well-breakfasted. That 65% chance of a favorable ruling declined nearly to 0% just before lunch, with that rate spiking again after lunch and again declining toward the end of the day.
So, what does this have to do with admissions? Well, in my decade working with clients, I’ve noticed that most of the people I work with invest admissions officers with a nearly mythical ability to judge their worth and to do so precisely and objectively. Thus, these clients (and especially their parents) fear being denied admissions because they see it as an objective repudiation of their value as students and even as people. Moreover, there has developed an immense ecosystem of highly dubious “admissions Kremlinology” in which people parse out in highly detailed ways what precisely each school looks for and how exactly you must thread the needle to get in.
Frankly, it’s nearly all nonsense. There is no Oracle at Cambridge, Wizard of Wharton, or Grand Poobah of Palo Alto. What you have are mostly earnest and hardworking people -like the judges in the study- who are human and thus subject to human failings. Indeed, because admissions is much more opaque and subjective than the law, it’s far more susceptible to the individual mood swings and unknowable, unpredictable circumstances of the room where the AdCom sits. If we know that judges, who are trained in their very specific job and must deal with clearly delineated laws and rules, produce results that are often swayed by random external factors, why would we assume that admissions officers -for whom there are no real national standards and who make their decisions in secret and without review- would somehow have and deploy flawless objective processes?
Take my case. After being rejected the first time, when I applied to PhD programs the second time, I got into five programs that had denied me just a few years before (Yale, Columbia, Michigan, Harvard, Cal-Berkeley), even though my core metrics (grades and GRE) were unchanged. And, even though those programs were very highly ranked (#1, #3, #5, #2, and #7, respectively, at the time), I did not get into NYU, which was barely in the top 25. Why didn’t NYU take me? Maybe I didn’t fit their precise profile, maybe the program already had too many students in the area I was studying… or maybe my Admissions Reader assessed my application at 11am and was grumpy. Who knows?
So what do you do with this information if you’re an applicant? My purpose isn’t to suggest that you become overly cynical about the process or that you don’t put in the requisite effort because it’s all random. That would be as dumb as a lawyer deciding that all verdicts are purely a function of time and thus shows up to court unprepared. Instead, here are the five main takeaways:
1. Take the process seriously, but never view this as some grand assessment of your value as a person or a divine weighing of your soul. It’s not. It’s a group of people who don’t know you trying their best to figure out who gets in. Yes, work hard to earn your educational goals, but don’t let the stress of it overwhelm you.
2. If you don’t get admitted, don’t take it personally. Understand that the randomness of it all means that next year the exact same candidate could get in. That said, if you dis-invest yourself emotionally as much as possible from the process, you can objectively look at your application and work to figure out what you can do better next time. You can even ask the AdCom why you didn’t get in; they’ll often give you a sketch of why.
3. Try again. Once you understand that admissions isn’t perfect, and that one committee’s assessment of your application isn’t immutable, you should feel inspired to try again. Obviously, work to both assess your last application’s weaknesses and to add experiences that make you more attractive.
4. Don’t buy too much into hyper-specific assessments of schools and programs. There is an immense industry out there that sells school-specific guides, etc. These are, honestly, of very marginal value. Yes, you want to understand a school’s core strengths, but it’s often the case that I work with clients who are so focused on tailoring their essay to a school that they forget the basics of writing. Though obviously you want both, a fantastic and compelling essay that is perhaps imprecisely tailored to a school will be more effective than a clunky, boring, and poorly written essay that’s intended to hit all the supposed check-marks for a particular school. In other words, make sure you tell a compelling story first.
5. Stay out of online forums. There are so many forums in which people offer advice on how to get into a particular school. Beyond the fact that it can be hard to separate out good advice from knowledgeable people from nonsense spouted by forum cowboys, the bigger truth is that once you accept that admissions is so subjective and often so personal to the readers of an application, you recognize that it’s a fool’s errand to try to over-tailor your essay for a reader whose tastes you just know almost nothing about.
At Gurufi.com, we understand that admissions can be vexing, opaque, and confusing. One of the things that frustrates us, as people within this industry, is that so many people are selling jargon-filled nonsense to clients. We believe that the best approach is a simple one. We don’t talk about “finding your brand”; we focus on telling your story. We don’t help you build your essay by looking at your CV in one hand and the Harvard Admissions brochure in the other; we work to mine, deploy, and refine your most authentic and powerful stories because our experience is that when you get the basics of storytelling right, your personal statement will be far, far more powerful than had it been built on the advice you received on some “assess my chances” forum.
Finally, I know personally how hard it is to keep the admissions process in perspective. When you hit “send” on your application, you feel as though you are delivering all of your hopes and dreams into the hands of people you may never meet. And, especially for high-performing and intelligent people, the desire to understand -and thus exercise more control over- this process is understandable. But, to keep your head through this process, you have to hold two ideas that may seem in tension: 1) you have to do everything you can to make yourself a compelling candidate, and 2) you have to accept that there is randomness involved, and it may just come down to whether or not your readers had a healthy breakfast.
For questions, feel free to reach out to the author at fobi@fourthwrite.com. In the coming months, we’ll be adding free guides and courses to our Facebook page, so be sure to ‘like’ us there as well.
