They say the personal statement is an applicants opportunity to distinguish him- or herself from the pack of students. My problem was, I wasn’t all that distinguished. I didn’t have an impressive list of extracurricular activities, or a distinguished record of community service, or a resume full of leadership positions. In college I studied hard and then I played hard, and didn’t do much in between to round out a resume.
So I didn’t have a compelling story to tell for my personal statement. What I did have was advice from the Personal Statement chapters of the How To Get Into Law School Books that I read sitting on the floor in Barnes and Noble, and my buddy Mike, who braved the investment banking/management consulting interview gauntlet and made himself its master. Naturally, Mike proved much more useful, and would go on to help me through three drafts of my statement before he pronounced himself “too invested in it” to be an objective judge. You just can’t stress enough how important it is to get a reader (preferably several!) who will see your essay strategically, asking what you’re trying to accomplish with it and evaluating how effective you are.
Since I didn’t have a good story to tell, I figured I’d just talk about myself. Tell the admissions committee what kind of person I am. What makes me tick. In a flattering way, of course. After some serious brainstorming and soul-searching, I came up with something I wanted to say. I’m all about solving problems, fixing things, getting results. This is pretty central to my interests and personality. So I scraped together a few anecdotes that related to this theme, and a few different expressions of it. Then, lacking an obvious intro, I leapt right in and wrote a draft:
I am a pragmatist, a problem solver, and engineer at heart. The most important question to me when I encounter a problem is “what can be done about it?” I want testable hypotheses from academics, and proposals for action from politicians and protestors. I hate fatalism. I love to hear “here’s what we can do better.” I’m impatient. I don’t like to cry over spilled milk.
There is little I find more intellectually satisfying than working out a strategy to solve a problem or accomplish a goal and then watching my ideas succeed in application. While morally there’s nothing more frustrating that continued conflicts with obvious solutions, what bothers me intellectually the most are problems with no apparent answer. This temperament extends beyond academics; it’s more generally how I approach the world. I’m correspondingly wary of ideologies, factions, and theoretical frameworks. I believe in hybrid vigor, convergent evolution, and political Third Ways. I like problems I can get a grip on, and accordingly have little patience for intrigue or Byzantine political machinations. The personality traits I most admire and seek out in others are honesty and forthrightness.
I think there’s something charming about the ad-hoc, the Jerry-rigged, the inelegant but crudely effective. I was talking to an Australian, who traced his country’s mutual animosity with New Zealand to a fateful cricket match, where the Kiwis needed the equivalent of a home run to win the game, and to prevent this, the Australian bowler rolled the ball aong the ground rather than pitching normally. Apparently, this was considered by Aussie and Kiwi alike to be sneaky, dishonourable, and unmanly play. My reaction was to applaud the sound strategy – a tea and crumpets analog to intentionally walking Barry Bonds.
At one point towards the end of my freshman year, students from my second-quarter introductory CS class who had won class programming contests were invited to eat lunch with the professor at the faculty club. The winners of the other contests had come up with fiendishly clever ways of making programs we’d all written for assignments run faster or use less memory when doing math on very large numbers or other computationally intensive tasks. I had done something rather different. One of those programs ran a simulation on a ten by ten grid where very simple programs called critters could move about and turn other critters they came across into copies of themselves. I won a tournament of custom critters by designing programs that would seek out and clump together in the corners of the grid, where they would be protected on two sides and could literally watch each others’ backs. This strategy required very carefully written critter programs to carry out, but what made my critters more successful than the others wasn’t that they better exploited the hardware they were run on, but that their strategy let them better take advantage of the rules of the game they were competing in.
Focusing on the task at hand is just as much about ignoring things that don’t matter as about obsessing over results. As such, I’m not naturally competitive, and am always on the lookout for ways a game might not be zero-sum. I swam competitively and played on the water polo team for four years in high school, but I never had the competitive spirit, the burning desire to crush the opposition, to be better than they were. It was more important to me that I do well, than that I win. Now I play water polo pick-up games in a PE class and to this day I’d rather lose a well-played game to friends and players I respect and come out grinning than to win a win a violent grudge match by throwing elbows at people I can’t stand. I like to think that lets me focus more sharply when there really does have to be a winner and a loser, and it’s certainly better for my sanity in the meantime.
When the time comes to unwind, I find myself impatient with tragedies and melodrama, where characters are doomed to misery, or worse, doom themselves to it. I take a road trip up to Ashland every year for the Oregon Shakespeare festival, but no matter how beautiful their speeches, I still get angry at Juliet and Romeo. I’m a sucker for a happy ending. My favorite books and movies are all comedies, and I have a dry sense of humor that I have been advised not to attempt to exhibit in this statement.
I’m making a conscious effort to keep it snappy. Keep your sentences short. I wanted something readable that wouldn’t bog down an admissions officer, and the blunt style plays well into my theme. I was hoping clean, spare prose would be refreshing to weary essay readers. Not entirely successful at this. Still, I’m especially proud of the finish there, which remains unchanged throughout the revisions.
And of course there are revisions to come. There are some obvious flaws (like: what’s the CS paragraph for?), and plenty of places where the language can be tightened and the sub-themes sharpened. But this post is too long already. I’ll talk about revising later.
No comments:
Post a Comment