Breakthrough Writer

Writing Your Personal Statement for College Admissions

Writing a personal statement is a difficult task because you have to sell yourself, that is convince College Admissions that you're a compelling candidate, without sounding phony and full of cliches. You try to sell yourself too much and you come across as an unctuous impostor. You don't sell yourself enough and you end up withholding your best qualities. The question, then, is how do you sell yourself and sound authentic? The answer is that your personal statement should focus on a THEMATIC NARRATIVE THAT EMPHASIZES YOUR MOST APPEALING QUALITIES. In other words, you avoid writing a general, broad, and often boring autobiography in favor of a highly selective autobiographical narrative that convinces the College Admissions that you are a viable candidate.

After reading dozens upon dozens of my students' personal statements, I have gathered the following Seven Narrative Themes, which you would be wise to identify for your own personal statement. How many themes should you focus on your essay? One is enough. But it's possible to divide your statement into halves, one theme for the first half, another theme for the second half. However, I doubt you could address more than two themes. And for most people, one theme will require all the maximum words allotted for your personal statement. You'll have to make your decision based on your individual circumstances. In any event, here are the 7 Narrative Themes:

1. A narrative that shows how you were once a child, naive and relatively dependent on others, to an adult, world-wise and self-reliant.

2. A narrative that shows how you rejected safety and comfort in order to find meaning through risk and challenge.

3. A narrative that shows how you overcame adversity, which tested your character and made you a wiser, more mature person.

4. A narrative that shows how you were once worried about fulfilling other people's expectations but that through your maturity you now set goals that fulfill your expectations.

5. A narrative that shows how you found meaning, wisdom, and maturity through service to others.

6. A narrative that shows how you were once isolated and lost and lacking direction and that through your fortitude you struggled to find belonging, identity, and purpose.

7. A narrative that shows how your mind was made-up to move in a certain path but that a dramatic incident inspired you to move in an unexpected, entirely different direction (your major).

Some Final Advice:

The College Admissions readers will become easily bored if you engage in generalities and cliches. Your job is to "suck the reader in" to your story with drama and vivid details. Staying focused on your narrative theme will also contribute to keeping your reader's interest and attention.

Your two biggest mistakes in writing your personal statement are to be boring and to sound phony. Your biggest assets are to focus on a narrative theme and to keep your reader's interest with concrete details.

If you want to see examples of personal statements that have been successful, you should purchase 50 Successful Harvard Application Essays.

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1A Lesson Plan for “Desert Breakdown, 1968”

Quiz Question: How does the story take Mark “back in the world”? His mirage of making it big in California to spite his parents dissolves and he’s left as a corpse in the desert of his broken dreams as he’s revealed for what he is, a spoiled child incapable of raising a family. Or: Give 7 pieces of concrete evidence that Mark is a thoroughly disgusting human being.

Mark’s Malignant Personality

1.    He is a selfish liar 119 and 122 top
2.    He has a perverted definition of freedom 120 and 144 in which we see his pathetic, immature view of marriage.
3.    He suffers from an inflated self-esteem or delusions of grandeur 120 bottom and 121 top
4.    In fact, Mark is not, as he sees himself, a talented man. He is a cipher or a nobody. In this sense he is a “missing person.” See page 130 where Krystal must ask the question: “What does he do?” She finally says he’s a singer.
5.    He has the audacity to feel cheated by Krystal’s condition of pregnancy 124
6.    Mark has a victim mentality that inclines him toward self-pity and defeat. 132
7.    His main motivation in life is to fulfill his Revenge Fantasy against his parents. 132, 133 top. See page 149 where he wants to stage a death to spite his parents.
8.    He scapegoats his parents for all his problems. 133 “They didn’t do squat for me.”
9.    His parents are only guilty of having realistic goals for their son. 133 Stay in Phoenix and get a real job.
10.    Mark has chosen death over life as evidenced by him getting inside a hearse full of the devil’s minions. 137
11.    Mark believes the world owes him. “The world owes me.” He has a sense of entitlement. 137 “The whole country turned its back on him.”
12.    Mark is gullible thinking he’s going to work on a movie set when in fact he’s with a bunch of Charles Manson cult killers. 142; They’re obviously on drugs evidenced on their speeding on page 146.
13.    He will betray his wife and children for this asinine plan of working on a film set. 143
14.    Ironically, his self-serving lie, his family doesn’t need him and is better off without him, is true. 143
15.    Like Donald and Peter, Mark depends on his parents to bail him out. 149, 150
16.    Krystal’s tantrum was really meant for Mark. 152
17.    Hope the character represents the fact that Krystal has gone “back into the world” and will leave Mark.
Thesis: The “back in the world” moments in Tobias Wolff’s short story collection can be characterized by people who must endure arduous suffering as they confront the hideous consequences of their inflated self-esteem (Leo, Mark, Peter); as they take accountability for their past misdeeds (Peter, Krystal); as they recognize the woeful deficiencies of people they thought they could rely upon (Leo with the church and Krystal with Mark); and as they find themselves only because their deluded schemes backfire and force them to confront their true nature (Leo turning into Slim)

1A Lesson for “The Rich Brother” (191)

Part One. Pete’s 6 Moral Flaws

1.    He worships money, seeing it as a solution for everything.
2.    He suffers from a brand of obnoxious smug pride rooted in his wealth. (“Grow up and get a Mercedes.”) In fact, Pete is not rich at all as evidenced by the story’s ironic title “The Rich Brother.” Pete in fact is anything but “rich.” He is impoverished by his condition of helplessness and moral decrepitude. Pete covers his flaws with a pose of hubris and braggadocio.
3.    He sees things only at face value without digging deeper because he is afraid of what he will find.
4.    He is afraid to confront his culpability for the past, namely, his role in hating on his brother Donald through his rivalry and blind ambition.
5.    Pete is a liar to his brother and to himself. For example on page 197 he lies about his dreams, claiming he only dreams about sex and money when in fact he is haunted by guilt for the sins he once committed against Donald. On 199 and 200 we find that Pete tried to kill his brother after an operation because he was jealous of the way his mother doted on Donald. Ironically, now it’s Pete who dotes on Donald and in doing so he assures that he keeps Donald crippled, which is to his advantage, or so he seeks.
6.    He is afraid to confront his current role as Donald’s “mother,” which is ironic since he in a way attempted to steal Donald’s mother from him. In other words, Pete is dependent on Donald being dependent on him. What we have here, then, are two brothers trapped in a snake grip of hatred from which they can never let go. In psychology this is called “symbiosis.”

Part Two. Donald’s 6 Moral Flaws.

1.    Driven by spite and cowardice, Donald sabotages his own life in order to make Pete bail him out again and again and again. This is Donald’s cowardly and passive-aggressive way of punishing Pete for what he did to him during childhood. Donald embodies the saying, “Bite my nose to spite your face.”
2.    He uses religion to judge others while ignoring his own egregious flaws. In other words, Donald is a pompous ass.
3.    Donald is stuck in a life of stagnation though he deludes himself with clichés that he is “breaking his pattern” (192)
4.    Donald is stuck on a sense of lugubrious identity known as “victimization.” He is both overcome by spite and self-pity. As a result of seeing himself as a victim, he has reached a point of no return in which he is both undateable and unemployable.
5.    As long as Donald can scapegoat Pete for all his problems, he never has to grow up and take accountability for his own actions.
6.    Donald is big on generosity but only with his brother’s money, not his own.

Part Three. The 7 Qualities of Symbiosis

1.    Two weak people merge to hide and reinforce their flaws.
2.    Two people become mutually dependent on the other in order to stop changing, growing, maturing, and fulfilling their potential.
3.    Two people use each other as a crutch and an excuse for their stagnation in life.
4.    One person gets stronger and stronger or so he thinks while the other gets weaker and weaker. In truth, both get weaker and weaker because bother are more and more dependent on the other.
5.    Two people stay together, not because of love, but because of weakness, hatred, and fear.
6.    In a symbiosis, both people are blind or fail to admit how dependent they are on the other. On page 201 we see that Pete has a dream about Donald in which Pete is blind.
7.    To use a psychological cliché, both parties of the symbiosis are called “enablers,” that is they perpetuate each other’s dysfunctions.

Part Four. Lexicon

1.    Decrepitude (weakened, broken down, the condition of both brothers)
2.    hubris
3.    braggadocio
4.    culpability
5.    dote
6.    symbiosis
7.    passive-aggressive
8.    scapegoat

Part Five. Who is undergoing the “Back in the World” journey and why?

Pete is going through the journey of facing his culpability in continuing to cripple his brother. As a child he resorted to violence. Now he is killing his brother by being like the doting mother, an enabler.

1A: McMahon's Thesis and Mapping Statements for Mindless Eating

Brian Wansink's Mindless Eating is the essential guide to permanently changing our eating habits because  Wansink bases his approach on well-grounded psychology. First, he acknowledges the futility of willpower in favor of effective mind tricks. Second, he relies on the wisdom of gradual, manageable change. Third, he empowers us by unearthing the insidious methodologies of the giant food marketing machine. Fourth, he alerts us to the subtle yet powerful sensory cues that press our overeating buttons and shows us how to disable those cues.

IMPORTANT NOTE: POSTED AS A SAMPLE ONLY. DO NOT USE THIS THESIS FOR YOUR ESSAY.

1C Lesson 4 for The Art of Loving

Fromm asserts that “contemporary western society” is an impediment to the fulfilled, loving individual because this sick society fosters various “pseudo-loves”:

1.    Being “loved,” that is to say, being popular because we look a certain way, enjoy powerful status, or own conspicuous items that other people want. See page 76.
2.    In the hierarchy of values we measure the quality of our lives on our profit margin, which we value over people. Therefore the condition of “being solvent” becomes a sort of pseudo-love. 78
3.    The bureaucracy’s needs squeeze out the individual resulting in impersonalization, which creates a pathological dependency on the institution. The institution becomes our “family” or our “team” or our “mothership.” This dependency is a pseudo-love. 79
4.    We gain acceptance or pseudo-acceptance through docile conformity and we mistakenly see this acceptance as a form of love. 79
5.    We judge our self-worth erroneously by looking at ourselves as commodities, which do or do not maximize profits. This type of self-acceptance is a pseudo-love. 80
6.    Not living a life of real love, we capitulate to the pseudo-love of superficial pleasure by becoming consumer hedonists whose only joy in life is the consumption of goods and the pursuit of ethereal pleasures. This results in Impoverishment Through Substitution whereby the more we try to fill our emptiness with worthless trifles and baubles the more empty we become.  80,81
7.    As “automatons” surrendering to a life of conformity, routine, and mindless consumerism, we pursue relationships in which we are “personality packages” looking for other “personality packages” of equal value in the romantic marketplace. 81
8.    We do not look at marriage as a sacred entity but as a “smooth running team” that imitates the functions of a successful corporation. 81
9.    We look at our marriage as a military unit at war with the competition so that our marriage is “egoism a deux,” an egotistical fortress of two against the world, which we confuse with love and intimacy. 81
10.    We have a narrow view of the world limited to science and materialism, which sees love as childish illusion. In other words, there is no world or realm beyond the material real of goods and services, which define who we are. As such we are decrepit philistines. 
11.    We measure our value as lovers exclusively by our sexual performance since our sexual prowess is at the sole core of our potency, power, youthfulness, and makes us attractive; in other words, our sex appeal is a form of pseudo-love.
12.    Since sex is the main focus of advertising, we look at sex as the ultimate form of loving, resulting in sexual addiction, also known as concupiscence (the insatiable appetites that war against our powers of reason)
13.    Idolatrous love—when we are languishing in our lack of maturity and sense of worthlessness, we project our need to be somebody by projecting our desires on an object of love who becomes our idol or god. 92
14.    Sentimental love—love is experienced as a fantasy, often in the past but never in the here and now. 93
15.    Easy love—the ridiculous idea that love can be defined as an absence of conflict. 95