How to boost your personal statement or college essay

A glimpse of my coaching services

Photo by Jannet Serhan on Unsplash

Demand for humanities degrees may be declining, but demand for great storytelling is not. I launched my coaching practice eight months ago, and I’ve found keen interest in my services among prospective graduate students. 

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court prohibited colleges and universities from practicing race-conscious admission, one form of affirmative action. The ruling raised the stakes considerably for application documents like the Personal Statement and Statement of Purpose, where applicants typically include personal details that might not be reflected in test scores, GPA, or other summaries of achievement. Even if race can’t be considered as an objective basis for college admission, it most certainly can be considered as one factor that might contribute to a diverse student body. 

While opponents of the Supreme Court ruling say that it is a step backward from racial equality, a potential upside is that suddenly all kinds of personal stories feel both relevant and compelling as part of the diversity equation. If you are a first-generation student, as I was, you bring something different to a graduate seminar than an affluent peer of the same race. Are you a military veteran? Do you live with a disability? Are you, or have you been, a refugee? As Jillian Goldfarb explains on her LinkedIn page, each of these stories could explain to an admissions committee why you are more resilient than the average student and how you might contribute to a diverse intellectual community. 

Great storytelling alone might not get you into Harvard. But when you are applying to schools that could admit 10x as many applicants as they currently do without sacrificing academic quality, every distinguishing factor counts. In that calculus, a high-performing personal statement might well be a game-changer. 

I have been privileged to help my clients transform their middling essays into expertly crafted life stories. Since application deadlines are looming, I’d like to offer that service to a broader audience.¹ 

Next Wednesday, November 29, from 1-2:30pm EST, I’ll offer a live workshop for prospective students and/or parents on honing a personal statement or college essay. If you can’t make it live, I’ll post the replay on Friday, December 1. Upgrade your subscription near the end of this post for the link to the live event and for access to the replay.

My workshop will teach you how to:

• Build and leverage audience awareness

• Cast a magic spell on your reader with your storytelling (and avoid breaking that spell)

• Replace common anecdotes with unforgettable scenes and images

• Establish high stakes and suspense

• Turn generic summaries into individual characters

• Show your stories rather than “telling” them

Applying these strategies to a personal statement or college essay will deliver a clear value proposition to an admissions committee.

If you have followed this series for any length of time, you’ll recognize the irony in me supporting students in pursuing advanced degrees. Much of my content characterizes academe as a sinking ship that even tenure-line faculty are fleeing. You’d be justified in wondering why I’d want to encourage anyone to follow in my footsteps. 

While I still feel that most students would be better off building industry careers rather than investing in a PhD, it is possible to approach graduate school with eyes wide open and a clear plan for moving straight from the hooding ceremony into a non-academic role. With intentional networking, skill building through internships and other non-academic partnerships, and an industry-friendly portfolio, graduate students can follow the same playbook that many of my interview guests recommend, only more strategically and fluidly. 

After I’ve talked this through with prospective clients and determined that their eyes are, indeed, wide open, that they have thought carefully about fit with each program, and that they still want my help crafting their application essays, I am delighted to go to work for them. 

Great storytelling is harder than it looks. And when it comes to life stories, memoirists bring more to the table than almost anyone else in transforming a mediocre personal statement into a high-performing essay. 

Many online guides teach the basic structure of an effective personal statement. But a personal statement is not a piece of IKEA furniture. Everyone needs to assemble their narrative differently from others.

Here is what a memoirist knows that many graduate school applicants don’t: 

🔹 You don’t write for yourself. You write for your readers. A personal statement is not about you. It's about how you might enrich a particular graduate program or an individual faculty member who mentors you. What's in it for THEM if they admit you? What return can they expect to see on their investment in you? What would it cost them if they let you go?

🔹 Tone is everything. Willa Cather described the quality of good fiction as "the over-tone divined by the ear but not heard by it." Memoirists don't publish a thing until they have developed an ear for tone. If your graduate program falls outside the humanities, you'll probably need help with this, so you don't come off as too stiff or too sentimental.

🔹 The most powerful stories don't finish on the page. They finish in the reader. How do you strike the right balance between explanation and suggestion, so that your story doesn't feel either overcooked or too obscure? Like a good joke, which allows the listener to connect the final dots, an unforgettable story guides a reader toward their own epiphany about what you might add to a graduate program.

It’s also worth asking how much a top-performing personal statement is worth. Working with a coach or editor might not cost more than a pair of good running shoes or a puffer jacket. But it could yield a fellowship or a college experience worth far more than that. 

If all this sounds good, I hope you’ll join me live next week or on your own time with the replay.

What qualifies me to teach this workshop? 

These storytelling strategies helped me:

• Earn full funding offers from 2 PhD programs²

• Secure 3 campus-wide fellowships in addition to a TA

• Land 12 interviews in a brutally competitive market for faculty jobs

• Get hired as a tenure-track professor

• Reach the rank of full professor in 11 years

I’ve also used variations of these techniques to:

• Publish more than 200 works in elite venues³

• Persuade an acclaimed university press to publish my own memoir

• Produce LinkedIn content that draws more than 40K views

• Build a Substack newsletter from 0-1600 readers in 19 months

Upgrade your subscription to attend the live workshop on 11/29 and/or for access to the replay on 12/1.

The link to the live event is below ⬇️