Wednesday, January 6, 2016 // The Statement
4C
Wednesday, January 6, 2016 // The Statement
5C
Editor’s Note: The name of a student has been changed
to protect the privacy of a source currently involved in the
FlexMed admissions process, denoted with an asterisk.
“Just about here, in the second paragraph, you write that when you got to college you
decided to work harder for better grades.”
My pointer finger was hovering over a piece of paper positioned on a table between
Wyatt*, a student I met ten minutes ago, and myself. His paper was overcrowded with black,
single-spaced text. Wyatt was writing his personal statement.
Wyatt is a sophomore at the University of Michigan applying to a FlexMed program
— an
early application process for undergraduate sophomores looking to guarantee early accep-
tance to medical school
— at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
“You go on to show me how rewarding getting good grades has been for you, compared
to the grades you got in high school, and you articulate pretty well that you are a driven
student … which is good.”
Wyatt’s writing was strong, but it seemed to be missing something: his writing needed
to prove to admissions officers that this change in getting good grades is significant in his
growth as a person. I can tell that, for Wyatt, this failure to get good grades in high school is
somehow crucial, but the ‘somehow’ is not clear for the reader and maybe not for Wyatt too.
I felt challenged with the task of figuring this out for Wyatt — talking to him just enough
so that he eventually, through wonderings and mumblings with me, exposed why his
change was so crucial.
As a peer consultant at the University of Michigan’s Sweetland Center for Writing, I work
for four hours every Sunday night in a small room in the basement of the Alice Lloyd Hall
dorms where students bring their essays for workshopping. According to Sweetland’s Peer
Writing Center System Statistics Report, this past fall 6.7% of students brought their per-
sonal statements for graduate programs, internship programs or job applications. Last fall
7.26% students brought personal statements. The fall semester before that 3.9% of students
did.
“What was the turning point?” I asked Wyatt. Wyatt’s head arches upward toward me;
his eyes don’t quite meet mine.
“What made you decide that you were going to get better grades?” I clarified. “Was it
really just looking at your high school transcript at the end of senior year, that was the turn-
ing point? Or was there something else, some other repercussion? What truly made you
realize it was important to work harder?”
Wyatt hesitated and then told me that if he was being honest, it was after he got rejected
from so many colleges. He felt horrible. Quickly after, he noted doubtfully that he couldn’t
write that in his personal statement. That would make him look like a failure to a FlexMed
admissions board.
“The personal statement” is a very real noun in today’s dictionary. The page it’s on in that
dictionary is fairly worn if you are a young adult. At the early age of seventeen we are asked
to write a 500-word document for various college admissions boards. Many undergraduate
students will write another personal statement when applying to a study abroad program,
again when applying to an internship program, again when applying to graduate schools,
and possibly many more times when applying to jobs as graduation creeps closer.
In April 2014, The New York Times wrote, “Enrollment at American colleges is sliding,
but competition for spots at top universities is more cutthroat and anxiety-inducing than
ever.” U.S. News and World Report calls it a “right college” frenzy. The Atlantic says the
myth of colleges becoming more selective is both true and untrue. Whether universities are
becoming more selective or not (they are, technically, but there are still plenty of spots for
students — just not plenty of spots at the top schools), there is a demanding emphasis placed
on how to best get into college.
The application process has been picked apart and formulized: 3.6 GPA plus 1950 SAT
score plus five extracurricular activities plus a personal statement equals accepted or reject-
ed. Despite the formulation of the college admissions process, the most human part of this
entire process, and arguably the most important part, is the personal statement. So just like
the GPA, the SAT and the extracurriculars, does the personal statement have a coefficient
in front of it? Does it have an equation that if satisfied with the right values produces the
right results?
In September 2015, University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science and the Arts’s
Newnan Advising Center piloted a small program that specifically advises students on their
personal statements for medical, law and graduate school. The pilot program, headed by
Academic Advisor Christopher Matthews, is a collaboration among several advisers: five
writing consultants, plus Newnan’s pre-law advisers, who offer sessions for law school-
specific applicants, and pre-health advisers, who do the same for med school applicants. A
service somewhat resembling this was previously offered through the University’s Career
Center.
According to Kerin Borland, the director of the Career Center, the center decided last
spring to stop offering their personal statement advising services. They saw students
through the summer months but discontinued the service last September. Borland explained
that the center’s intention in working with students on their personal statements was to talk
about presentation and telling their story, but in reality they found themselves correcting
students’ spelling, sentence structure and theses. It became less of a “career issue” and more
of a “writing skills issue,” Borland said.
When asking Matthews, Pre-Health and General Academic Adivsor David Brawn and
Pre-Law and General Academic Advisor Denise Guillot how they instruct students on their
for-college personal statements, it’s clear not a single one of them is studying the personal
statement as a curriculum. It’s because there isn’t a curriculum per-se. Instead, personal
statement advisers at the Newnan Center follow a combination of their past experiences in
the field, their past experiences working with personal statements and their interactions
by Claire Bryan, Editorial Page Editor
with admissions officers.
Guillot, one of two pre-law advisers, was
e-mailing the Law School a series of ques-
tions about how to deal with students writing
about sensitive issues like health problems or
learning disabilities the Friday morning I
went and spoke with her.
“I try to get really specific feedback about
how admissions people respond to that
kind of deeply personal issue,” she said. “It
is important for students to be able to talk
about it. And to be able to talk about it in a
way that is constructive is really important
in the personal statement.”
This type of communication is common.
Guillot consistently invites representatives
from law schools around the state to come
talk to her and her students. Every year there
are both national and regional pre-law advis-
er networks that host conferences where
advisers and admissions officers meet. Both
Guillot and Brawn sit in and watch admis-
sions work.
“They’ll be very explicit with us,” Brawn
remembered. “Saying please tell your stu-
dents that we need to hear these things: If
we can’t see some sense of cultural humil-
ity, if we can’t see some genuine caring for
the patients that they worked with, then we
don’t care if they have a perfect MCAT and a
4.0, they aren’t getting into med school.”
The words were rolling off Brawn’s tongue
faster than I could write in my purple note-
book. When he paused to take a breath, I
jumped in, awkwardly.
“But does it feel genuine? Is what those
admissions officers are saying to you really
what they are looking for when reading a
personal statement?”
I was thinking about Wyatt and the com-
petitive FlexMed application process he is in.
Do colleges expect more from the personal
statement because they are really trying to
find a connection with the student? Or are
consultation services that strive to generate
these perfectly crafted statements, maybe
the very one I’m involved in, just players in
this cutthroat admissions game? Are our
efforts, of making a student find some con-
nection with his growth and articulate that
on page, worthy efforts?
Brawn smiled a bit and sat up straighter in
his chair.
“I was surprised the first time I got to sit in
on an admissions committee work,” he said.
“The language that I saw was like communi-
ty, is she going to be happy here? What does
he really know about medicine?”
Brawn’s words painted a room for me:
There are people who have various com-
mitments sitting around a table. Someone’s
there whose emphasis is research, someone’s
there whose emphasis is diversity, someone’s
there who is specifically trying to provide
a different perspective. Sometimes there’s
even a student on the committee. As a whole
they are trying to put together a class that
clicks. They want this person to join this
community and have the people in the com-
munity better off because this student is in it.
They see the profession as a community. So,
they’re asking: Is this person going to carry
the reputation of this school forward? Is this
a person I want to work next to?
Brawn’s picture made me think of the per-
sonal statement with so much more weight
and importance. The personal statement
process — when stripped of the commer-
cialized, cutthroat culture of writing the
best personal statement that so many high
schools, websites and outside college coun-
seling firms talk about — is the powerful
gateway that determines if someone is going
to be a doctor.
Sitting around the table of my high school’s
“The Craft of NonFiction” class, we all had
secrets. My classmates and I were exactly
who Pollack was talking about, the genera-
tion who looked to the literary world of mem-
oir to know how to write about ourselves.
Our summer reading had been Dave Eggers’s
memoir “Heartbreaking Work of Stagger-
ing Genius,” our class discussion the week
before was all about Joan Didion’s “Goodbye
To All That,” an essay about her navigation
as a young adult living in New York City. We
weren’t anyone significant at the table if we
didn’t have a story to share. In dangerously
thick waters of comparing our tragedies with
others’ tragedies, we wrote real writing that
helped us grow as young adults. But at the
end of the day we were cutting sentences,
ideas, thoughts, reworking structure and
adding shameless plugs of leadership charac-
teristics not for ourselves, not to share with
our peers, but for that “caffeinated wretch”
who David has put in all of our minds. At the
end of the day, we were exposing our vulner-
ability for potential gain in a college process.
We were marketing our troubles as tangible,
manageable and “overcome-able” to show
colleges, to show our world around us, that
we were good enough. But if those colleges
didn’t like that, didn’t like everything we had
overcome on paper, they could — and usually
did — reject us.
For Guillot, the pre-law advisor, one of the
most interesting parts of the job comes when
she sits in front of students that don’t feel
they have a story to tell. “I try to ask them to
try to just talk to me. Sometimes when you
think about the challenges of telling a story
it is the process of writing that is stopping
them.”
They can tell a verbal story just like they
talk to their friends about something that
happened to them or to family members,”
she continued. “But somehow translating
between verbal and written is hard for a lot
of people. I will ask them to tell me about
something they experienced while they were
a college student that had an impact.”
The hardest part of the job and one of the
most fundamental truths when it comes to
these personal statements is that there are
appropriate topics and inappropriate top-
ics. There are students who may mentally be
going back in their memory many times to
something but it may not be the proper thing
to write about for a professional program.
“You have to find positive ways to tell them
it is not going to work,” Guillot said. “If you
do a good job with the personal statement
you position someone to see themselves in a
new way, ideally with a greater understand-
ing of their agency, a greater sense of where
they want to go next and why.”
Guillot shared that students aren’t always
there, in terms of understanding or connec-
tion, when writing their personal statements.
“If the student is not ready to see the con-
nection between their experience and their
skill, I don’t force it on them. I try to talk to
them about it, I try to pull it out and ask prob-
ing questions, try to get them to see.”
“If they don’t see it and it’s not genuine or
sincere then that is not what their statement
should be about,” Guillot’s eyes looked up.
“And it is okay, they need to be who they are
and their personal statement needs to reflect
where they are at in life.”
The University of Michigan’s campus,
along with every college campus, is filled
with literary magazines and newspapers
that print personal statements. A literary,
more artistic version of what we are asked
to do for college admissions boards. In high
school I tried to weave my own story into
500 words. I wrote about a series of events:
my siblings going away to college and leaving
me, the youngest sibling, behind, my parents’
marriage fumbling apart and back together
again, my move out of my childhood home.
This was one way to put what was going on
in my life into words. And though you could
argue my writing was for an admissions
board, marketed and packaged, couldn’t you
say the same thing about the writing being
published in these magazines and newspa-
pers advertising the lives of our generation’s
confessional writers? Via competitive admis-
sions processes and literary magazines pop-
ularity, we seem to be asked and encouraged
to expose ourselves a whole lot more than
our parents’ generation ever was.
I told Wyatt about my creative nonfiction
class in high school where we wrote our per-
sonal statements. I asked him to think about
how getting rejected from colleges made him
learn something about himself. I waited for
him to think, to dig deep and tell me some
secret about his life. I was hoping, maybe
more because of my own attraction to story
telling, that he would give me something I
could help him expose, market and package
for an admissions board. Something he could
write about, love the sound of, and know was
a new, significant part of who he is.
Read more online at michigandaily.com
generation PS
the evolution of the personal statement
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