What Makes an Effective Personal Statement or Common App Essay

What Makes an Effective Personal Statement or Common App Essay

Your personal statement should uniquely reflect who you are, what you value, and how you think—while also engaging and even surprising the reader.

You may be thinking, “Nothing much has happened to me! How can I surprise the reader?” Well, one of the biggest myths about the personal statement is that you can’t write a good one unless you have a “big” or tragic story to tell: “I was on my way to becoming a professional skater before I shattered my ankle,” or “I overcame a life-threatening disease then founded my own nonprofit to fund research on that disease.” While an experience like this could make for an excellent (though painful) personal statement, it could also make for…a really boring essay. Though it’s sad to say it, admissions officers have read many of these stories and so aren’t surprised or even moved by them.

Just think about it: admissions officers read thousands of essays every year, year after year. To get through them all, they have to read quickly, stopping once they figure out which “pile” you belong in (yes, no, or maybe). Your goal is to force that reader to slow down, even stop—to make them want to read your essay, to make them think, “I’ve never seen this before!” Admissions officers are more likely to have seen the “big” stories before—every year, they read thousands of essays about sports injuries and divorces, about Eagle Scout projects and difficult classes. Often, the best way to surprise the reader is to think small—to write about an unusual hobby (Sample Essay 6 in The Complete College Essay Handbook) or passion (Sample Essay 5 in The Complete College Essay Handbook)—or to write about a more common experience in an unexpected way, like discussing your parent’s divorce in the context of a violent protest (Sample Essay 4 in The Complete College Essay Handbook). Surprise can also be contextual. A varsity soccer player writing about varsity soccer? Not surprising. A varsity soccer player writing about his passion for cooking? That’s surprising!

A note: not all surprises are not created equal. There is the pleasant, gentle “surprise party” kind of surprise, and then there is shock, which can be invoked through violent images or vulgar confessions, and which produces negative emotions—fear, disgust, anger, and more.

Finally, a word on style and structure. The personal statement has two central elements: scene and reflection. Scene shows the reader what happened in an exciting way, and reflection explains its relevance. At the same time, your personal statement shouldn’t be all scene, but a balanced mix of scene and reflection. Reflection enables you to place the scene into its larger context and to show you thinking through the story.

Grad a copy of The Complete College Essay Handbook to keep learning more!

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What is a Personal Statement (Example: The Common App Essay)

What is a Personal Statement (Example: The Common App Essay)

It’s June, which means it’s time to start working on college admissions essays. This month, we’ll share some excerpts from our book, The Complete College Essay Handbook, starting with some personal statement tips!

First, what exactly is a personal statement like the Common Application essay?

A personal statement is a creative essay of 650 words or less that reads like a short story, memoir, or novel—not like an academic essay, textbook, or newspaper article. The best personal statements tell a story that culminates in a meaningful realization and offers the reader a glimpse of a mind in the process of thinking.

The personal statement is not the place to brag about accomplishments (student body president, team captain, founder of a schoolwide service project), or about how amazing you are (“I’m a world-changing revolutionary!”).

Although people you don’t know are going to read it, the personal statement is not a public form, like a school-wide speech. The personal statement is an intimate form, like a secret. It is the place to be honest, vulnerable, and raw, to reveal mistakes and weaknesses, to open up about an experience you’d only tell someone you were really close with, to explore what you struggle with and what scares you.

The personal statement is not “about” an event or achievement. It is about the psychological and emotional processes that occurred “behind the scenes.”

The same story, told from one angle, can be impersonal whereas, from another—told with a focus on the process rather than the outcome—can become deeply personal. Here are a few examples to help explain what I mean.

  • NO (Impersonal): The story about how you got elected student body president and a detailed account of everything you plan work on once in office
  • YES (Personal): The story about your internal struggle to overcome a crippling fear of public      speaking in order to run for student body president
  • NO (Impersonal): The story about how you changed lives by raising money for an orphanage in Africa
  • YES (Personal): The story about how you decided to start raising money for an orphanage because you yourself had been adopted and always struggled with the fact that your birth parents had abandoned you
  • NO (Impersonal): The story about how tearing your ACL was hard because you couldn’t play football or see your friends for a few months
  • YES (Personal): The story about how tearing your ACL gave you the time to reflect on who you are and you realized you didn’t want to just be an athlete so you started writing poetry and made new friends at school

Notice how all of these negative examples focus on the superficial event: I was elected; I raised money; I tore my ACL. By contrast, the positive examples explore the story behind the event—what was going inside of the writer that either led to this event (the student body president and orphanage examples) or the internal change that resulted from it (the ACL example). They also explore intimate, potentially difficult topics.

Since the personal statement is a creative essay at its heart, there is no set formula for success—however, our process and essay samples will give you the tools and examples you need to write your own singular personal statement.

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Best Summer Programs for High School Students: Real Estate

Best Summer Programs for High School Students: Real Estate

The following are some of our favorites for students interested in real estate.

The Fordham Real Estate Institute

This summer, get a behind-the-scenes look at the many facets of the New York City real estate industry and learn what it takes to succeed in this fast-paced, high-income field. The Fordham Real Estate Institute offers high school students the opportunity to learn how real estate—the built environment in which we all live, work, and play—is designed, constructed, and developed. Through a mix of live lectures, hands-on exercises, and examinations of prominent New York City properties, students gain a unique perspective into the numerous college study and career options that the field of real estate offers. All courses are taught by experienced industry professionals from Fordham’s Real Estate Institute.

Real Estate NYC: From Design to Development Class (NYU)

Over one-third of the world’s wealth is invested in real estate, and more than nine million people in the United States work in the real estate industry. What goes on behind the scenes? What makes New York City among the most expensive real estate markets in the world? How does one get started in the field? Learn from top industry professionals during this one-week course offered by the NYU School of Professional Studies Schack Institute of Real Estate, one of the largest and most prestigious educational entities dedicated to the real estate and construction industries in the United States. Delve into all aspects of the real estate development process, and gain an understanding of the procedures, issues, and complexities that come into play in the development of real estate. Explore how real estate projects are conceived, designed, valued, financed, constructed, and managed. By week’s end, you will have gained an in-depth understanding of the phases of real estate development and the role that each sector of the industry plays in the process. Topics to be covered include the history of real estate design and development, the varying roles of members of the development team (architect, engineer, builder/CM, attorney), real estate underwriting metrics, valuation, project feasibility, design phase/construction phase considerations, sustainability measurements, and property and asset management.

NAIOP Commercial Real Estate High School Internship Program

The path to increased diversity in the commercial real estate industry begins with introducing teens to CRE prior to entering college. Students have the opportunity to explore a variety of careers in real estate, such as architecture, development, investment, construction, brokerage, and urban planning, through the lens of a case study and real estate–focused activities. Students gain a deeper understanding of key concepts in real estate by exploring these topics with Drexel University professors, industry mentors, and high-level corporate executives. The NAIOP-Drexel Summer Real Estate program features several team building, college readiness, and enrichment events on Drexel’s campus and throughout the city, including site visits to high-profile locations such as FMC and Comcast.

Online courses (free)

https://www.coursera.org/professional-certificates/keller-williams-real-estate-agent 

https://www.coursera.org/learn/the-principles-of-real-estate

https://www.coursera.org/learn/wharton-ai-application-insurtech-real-estate-technology

https://www.coursera.org/projects/deep-learning-for-real-estate-price-prediction

Online courses (not free)

Real Estate Finance (For Beginners)

Basic Real Estate Finance Course

Introduction To Real Estate Finance & Investing

Shadowing someone who works in real estate is also a great option; reach out about internships via LinkedIn. (yes, you can and should be on LinkedIn in high school!)

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New Schools Added to the Common App!

New Schools Added to the Common App!

So many schools are now on the Common App for the 2020-2021 application year! We love knowing students will have fewer apps to fill out. You can find the full list of new members here — some popular new adds include:

Loyola U., Chicago
Auburn
Clemson
Coastal Carolina
U. Georgia
U. of Louisville
U. of South Florida

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Degrees via Coursera? Yes!!!

Any student who works with me knows that I love Coursera and edX. I love the content on both platforms, and I love that it is FREE. I encourage high school students to sign up for classes on both sites; it’s an excellent way to learn more about a specific school and what classes/faculty are like there, as well as take a deeper dive into potential fields of study/majors.

Given my love of MOOCs, I was excited to read about some big news today from Coursera:  it’s championing degree programs!!!

Read the full article on Inside Higher Ed here, and some highlights below:

If you dig through the ancient (circa 2011) archives of everything written about the high-octane brand of massive open online courses, you actually won’t find the founders of Coursera doubting the value of traditional degrees or the colleges and universities that created them (unlike some of their peers — yes, you, Sebastian Thrun). That would have been foolhardy since Coursera worked closely with and depended on universities to produce the content that the technology platform spread far and wide.

But plenty of prognosticators, futurists and journalists who should have known better disparaged higher education by trumpeting Coursera and the other MOOC providers, saying that by making course material freely available to anyone, anywhere, anytime, the platforms heralded the beginning of the end of higher education’s stranglehold over credentialing and, in due time, the institutions themselves.

Coursera is linked closely enough to the deepening meme about the digital “disruption” of traditional higher education that the company’s pivot back to higher education — underscored by today’s announcement that it is more than doubling, to 10, the number of degree programs it is creating with university partners, including its first bachelor’s degree — may seem surprising.

The company has its hands in many parts of the learning landscape, working closely with companies that want to train their workers and continuing to provide individual learners with thousands of courses they can take freely (or at low cost if they want to prove they completed successfully).

But Coursera is now putting much of its energy into — and staking much of its future on — academic programs launched in conjunction with some of the world’s leading universities, with Arizona State University, Imperial College London and the Universities of London and Michigan joining its degree-program ranks today.

The company and its campus partners believe these new credentials can take advantage of the platform’s extensive reach of 31 million users to drive down the costs of recruiting students (and hence the tuitions they charge) and help the universities begin to slice their degree programs into shorter-term credentials.

“We are squarely betting on universities — and on the continued relevance, even dominance, of the degree as the master credential,” says Jeff Maggioncalda, Coursera’s CEO since June.

At the same time, he says, the company and its university partners are focused on “redesigning the degree to make it extremely compelling to learners around the world, and a formidable answer to any emerging credentials that might challenge the degree.”

Coursera’s Soon-to-Be 10 Degree Programs

Current Programs

New Programs:

  • Bachelor of computer science, University of London
  • Master of applied data science, University of Michigan
  • Master of computer science, Arizona State University
  • Master of computer science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  • Master of public health, Imperial College London
  • Master of public health, University of Michigan