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 @michaeluwill 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.
). 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.