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

Design by Shane Achenbach

