Please Critique My Personal Statement Rough Draft Forum

[Anonymous User]

Questions and Answers.

“Where do you see yourself in 5 years?” Alive? Working? Still taking this test? Posing unsatisfying rhetorical hypotheticals? When I was younger, I was terrified of the uncertainty of the future. In school, my biggest fears weren’t girls, grades, or God; it was guidance counselors. It was “career development.” It was the Briggs-Myers test. It was deciding between being a coal miner or a florist for the next 50 years. These are daunting questions when I have to get back to class and I’m still deciding on hamburger steak or pizza for lunch in the next 50 minutes.

“What do you want to be?” At 18, I honestly had no idea. I was the first in my family to consider college and knew that I had opportunities at [College XYZ], but mostly I was confused and just wanted the questions to stop. I just knew that I wanted to learn more about myself and about the world. That’s why the next question was a lot easier.

“What’s your major?” History. I always had a predisposition to argumentation and analysis, but my reasoning and conclusions were always the weakest when directed inward. The questions and answers were always easier when they were about another person, another place, and another time. Studying history would provide a sandbox for my intellectual curiosities without the burden of expectations or the scrutiny of judgment. What better way to end the questioning and the doubt than to change the subject. At least, that’s what I thought. My professors didn’t see it this way.

“How did you reach this conclusion?” I can’t say that I didn’t expect this question; I just didn’t realize how important it would be for my future. Studying history, the answers never came as easy and the questions never stopped. Professors wrote that question on every draft, and each answer on each rough draft lead to another question which lead to another page on my essay. I became a completist. No matter how early I started planning and researching, I was never satisfied with my papers. I felt I never got them right; instead, I just ran out of time. Before I knew it, I had completed my coursework in my second year. I should have been thrilled, but I wasn’t. I still had too many questions to answer and too many books to read.

“What’s your second major?” English was a natural extension of history. Studying World War I poetry, I learned the interconnectedness of the disciplines and began to see academia as a interdisciplinary venture. I took more classes in political science, philosophy, and archaeology. My diverse range of courses helped me identify overarching answers. While reading Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice for German literature, I was also studying Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil for German philosophy and Hitler’s Mein Kampf for Holocaust history. As I read further, I understood that the divisions between the English, history, and other departments were somewhat arbitrary. I saw my education not as a fragmented form with boxes of requirements to fulfill, but as a cohesive whole with unlimited possibilities and endless questions. Routinely, I turned in essays twice the length requirement, because I wanted to address every possible question and objection to my conclusion and argument. I spent nine months researching and writing my 70-page honors thesis about JRR Tolkien and his non-Machinean view of good and evil in The Lord of the Rings. I traced Tolkien's “good works” view through various classical literature, mythology, and folklore texts including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Nordic mythology (particularly the Kalevala), Milton's Areopagitica and Paradise Lost, Plato's Gorgias, and Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy. I read voraciously, even ravenously. I wrote and edited constantly, but still the questions remained.

“Why do you want to go to graduate school?” I wanted my MA in English literature, because I wasn’t finished looking for answers. I earned my MA, because I realized the questions were more important. I spent a year researching and writing another 70-page thesis on T. S. Eliot’s poetry criticism and ideas he drew from another lesser-known critic. I reinforced my conclusions with primary source research, working as a research assistant on the T. S. Eliot Prose Project. During my months of research and reading, I began to see a new thesis and a new topic on each page in each paragraph. There weren’t always satisfactory answers, but even the questions were illuminating in helping refine my research. My biggest obstacle was in deciding what to leave out of my thesis, not in what to put in. My thoroughness never abated my curiosity, but I realized it didn't need to. For the first time in my life, I was comfortable with ambiguity about questions that could never be answered.

“Why do you want to be a college professor?” I took my new-found conviction into teaching composition and argumentation because I wanted to help those who were like me. I wanted to show that through writing, researching, and debating, we can approach the troubling questions of the world. In English, history, and many other disciplines, answers are often debatable, even interchangeable. However, it is the questions that keep scholars studying, research progressing, and the world turning. We are all attempting to ascribe some meaning to chaos and it is only through the pursuit of knowledge and attempting to answer our own questions that I have achieved any clarity.

“Why do you want to be a lawyer?” There are still questions that need answering and people that need help answering them.

[tskela]

There's only one sentence about why you want to be a lawyer specifically, and it doesn't really say anything. Why law? Your PS makes it sound like you're meant for academia.

[gentlemanscholar]

I am a picky reader, but I like this PS. The presentation/organization is clever and original. I think it is well written.

Just a couple things bother me. I feel like you are trying hard to impress the reader; the title dropping gets a little excessive. Maybe only mention a couple of the works that were really influential for you.

I would also be careful not to characterize yourself as indecisive. Your anxiety over your future is a little bit of a turn off. Focus on your intellectual curiosity as your driver for education, and not "fear of guidance counselors."

In my opinion, with a little bit of polishing, you'll have a working PS.

[janborn]

I think the structure is really clever, but like mentioned above, indecisive should be avoided.

[Anonymous User]

In response to the feedback, I've edited another draft to my original topic, but also generated an entirely new draft on a different topic. I tried playing down the indecisiveness for intellectual curiosity in the first. In the new draft, I'm trying a different angle.

Questions and Answers.

“What do you want to be?” At 18, I honestly had no idea. I was the first in my family to consider college and knew that I had opportunities at [College XYZ], but a career seemed far off and too limiting. My intellectual curiosity thirsted for breadth and depth. I wanted to learn everything and to be everything. This turned out to be both a gift and a curse. It was the driving force behind my education and my work ethic, but it was also the reason I had trouble figuring out what I wanted to be. I was told to simplify, simplify, simplify and not to “make things so complicated.” I needed to just pick a career field and stick with it, or so I was told. That’s why the next question was a lot easier.

“What’s your major?” History. I always had a predisposition to argumentation and analysis, but my reasoning and conclusions were always the weakest when directed inward. The questions and answers were always easier when they were about another person, another place, and another time. Studying history would provide a sandbox for my intellectual curiosities without the burden of expectations or the scrutiny of judgment. What better way to end the questioning and the doubt than to change the subject. At least, that’s what I thought. My professors didn’t see it this way.

“How did you reach this conclusion?” I can’t say that I didn’t expect this question; I just didn’t realize how important it would be for my future. Studying history, the answers never came as easy and the questions never stopped. Professors wrote that question on every draft, and each answer on each rough draft lead to another question which lead to another page on my essay. I became a completist. No matter how early I started planning and researching, I was never satisfied with my papers. I felt I never got them right; instead, I just ran out of time. Before I knew it, I had completed my coursework in my second year. I should have been thrilled, but I wasn’t. I still had too many questions to answer and too many books to read.

“What’s your second major?” English was a natural extension of history. Studying World War I poetry, I learned the interconnectedness of the disciplines and began to see academia as a interdisciplinary venture. I took more classes in political science, philosophy, and archaeology. My diverse range of courses helped me identify overarching answers. As I read further, I understood that the divisions between the English, history, and other departments were somewhat arbitrary. I saw my education not as a fragmented form with boxes of requirements to fulfill, but as a cohesive whole with unlimited possibilities and endless questions. Routinely, I turned in essays twice the length requirement, because I wanted to address every possible question and objection to my conclusion and argument. I spent nine months researching and writing my 70-page honors thesis about JRR Tolkien and his non-Machinean view of good and evil in The Lord of the Rings. I traced Tolkien's “good works” view through various classical literature, mythology, and folklore texts. I read voraciously, even ravenously. I wrote and edited constantly, but still the questions remained.

“Why do you want to go to graduate school?” I wanted my MA in English literature, because I wasn’t finished looking for answers. I earned my MA, because I realized the questions were more important. I spent a year researching and writing another thesis on T. S. Eliot’s poetry criticism and ideas he drew from another lesser-known critic. During my months a research assistant on the T. S. Eliot Prose Project, I began to see a new thesis and a new topic on each page in each paragraph. There weren’t always satisfactory answers, but even the questions were illuminating in helping refine my research. My biggest obstacle was in deciding what to leave out of my thesis, not in what to put in. My thoroughness never abated my curiosity, but I realized it didn't need to. For the first time in my life, I was comfortable with ambiguity about questions that could never be answered and complexity that could never be simplified.

“Why do you want to be a college professor?” I took my new-found conviction into teaching composition and argumentation because I wanted to help those who were like me. I wanted to show that through writing, researching, and debating, we can approach the troubling questions of the world. In English, history, and many other disciplines, answers are often debatable, even interchangeable. However, it is the questions that keep scholars studying, research progressing, and the world turning. We are all attempting to ascribe some meaning to chaos and it is only through the pursuit of knowledge and attempting to answer our own questions that I have achieved any clarity.

“What do you want to be?” At 30, I know what I want to be. I want to be a lawyer because there are still questions that need answering and people that need help answering them. Complexity is a virtue and law is for the virtuous. Questions of fariness, justice, and the law will dictate the kind of world we live in the 21st century and the most vulnerable members of society will need the most help in confronting these questions. As a society, we need smart, diligent, dedicated, driven, motivated, and intellectually curious people – people with diverse interests across many backgrounds beyond simply their bachelor’s degree and their pedagogy – and I want to be one of those people.

[Anonymous User]

Different draft.

Quality, not Quantity: The Power of Ignorance and a Well-Reasoned Argument

When I was younger, I was smart enough to know that I didn’t know anything, but dumb enough to think I knew how to remedy my ignorance: Quantity. If I could just accumulate enough facts, trivia, and mundanity, then I wouldn’t be ignorant anymore. I would be smart. Therefore, I developed a singular, all-encompassing mantra: I would watch all of the great films ever made. I couldn’t devour every piece of great literature; I couldn’t visit every breathtaking natural wonder; and I couldn’t travel across the globe to marvel at every renowned sculpture and painting. However, I could watch every great film. By my sophomore year, I was off to a good start, too.

At [[College XYZ]], the Undergraduate Library had the equivalent of a Blockbuster in the basement with thousands of DVDs and VHS cassettes. I would spend hundreds of hours in that basement. Early mornings, late nights, weekends, holidays – every spare minute, I was there. I tried to squeeze as many films as I could – 2-3 per day, up to 25 per week. If I skipped breakfast, brought lunch with me to class, and studied on the bus, I could fit in another movie that day. It became a ritual: watch a film, cross it off the list, and move on to the next. There was no recognition or appreciation of greatness, just binge-watching. I was still clueless.

Inevitably, I watched a lot but learned nothing. Before I could even formulate ideas or opinions about the subject matter, I was putting in another disc and credits were rolling again. After three months, one day bled into another and the films became white noise. One silent Ozu film was the same as another. Hitchcock in the 40s was no different from Hitchcock in 60s. Orson Welles and D. W. Griffith were interchangeable. In my quest for knowledge, I was failing, until I watched Federico Fellini’s Amarcord.

It was just another movie and just another day, but something was different. I finished watching the movie, pulled out the disc in anger, and just sat there staring at the TV screen. I struggled to collect my thoughts because I was baffled by it. It had no narrative or characters; it was just a collage of nameless, recurring archetypes acting out a series of vignettes in Italian with a perverse sense of humor. I hated it. I didn’t watch another movie for two weeks.

Over the next several days, no matter what I was doing, my thoughts kept coming back to Amarcord. I was consumed because I couldn’t understand the movie. For the first time in a long time, I genuinely felt ignorant. I couldn’t revert to the safety of just watching more movies. The lists, my mantra, accumulation, quantity – all of it ceased to matter. It was like a nightmare I couldn’t escape, so I watched Amarcord again. If it was somehow possible, I hated it even more the second time. It was still incomprehensible and I was mad – mad at the director for making it, mad at myself for watching it again, but most of all, mad that it had been deemed “great.” Who could think that was great?

Anyone I talked to – friends, family, classmates, roommates, people at the library, I told them about the film and how much I hated it. I advocated vehemently and passionately against it. I ached to discuss it, debate it, and critique it. Most had no opinion on a 1973 Italian film, but I could not be deterred. Watching Amarcord twice and analyzing it thoroughly was more fruitful for my analytical abilities than binge-watching an indecipherable mass of directors and titles had been. My pace of 25 films a week have slowed to a crawl and then to screeched to a halt, but now, I was learning. I was engaging with the ideas in a way I had never done before. It was becoming about the quality of my film-watching experience, instead of the quantity of films watched.

After exhausting myself haranguing innocent bystanders with my screed on an obscure Fellini film, I thirsted for dissenting opinions, if for no other reason than to disagree with them . I read Roger Ebert’s essay on Amarcord in the “Great Movie” section of his website. I was floored. It was insightful, probing, and educational. It was beautiful. The picture he painted and the film he described was magnificent – a triumph of a filmmaker at the height of his powers. I was so moved by what he wrote and the power of his reasoning that I didn’t even want to argue with what he wrote. I just wanted to Amarcord to be as breathtaking as he described it. I wanted to watch that film that he described, so I did. Again.

I watched Amarcord for the third time. Now, I was really mad and dumbstruck. Previously, I had resigned myself to hating Amarcord. I had discussed it, debated it, and critiqued it, but Ebert’s argument had changed all that. His reasoning and persuasion elevated the film’s potential. If he saw greatness in it, why could not I, as well? What did he see that I was not seeing? No matter how much I wanted to, I couldn’t ignore the power of his argument. I was fighting my own ignorance.

I did the inevitable. I read the review again and was frustrated all over again, not at the film, but at Ebert for the review. I wanted to argue with him. I honestly thought that if I just talked with him about the film, he’d see the error of his ways. Of course, that was impossible. I couldn’t argue with Ebert, so I had to settle for the next best thing: I argued with the review.

I went line-by-line, claim-by-claim, example-by-example through the essay and annotated all of it. Then, I rewatched the film again and again and again trying to see what Ebert saw in the film, using his review as a guide. Rote, mechanical, consumption of several films was gone to be replaced by detailed, thorough, consideration of one. More and more of my ignorance and impatience eroded with each viewing of the film and each critique of the essay. Through research and reasoning, I was understanding.

After watching Amarcord 20 more times during the spring semester of my sophomore year, I was finished. I didn’t agree with all of Ebert’s points and I still don’t like the film, but I understand his counterarguments and appreciate the film all the more from the diligent research and analysis I have done on the film.

I may not watch all of the great films ever made, but I will appreciate the quality great ones that I do see. I won’t agree with every opinion (about a film or not) that I read, but I will strive to understand and find merit in it, even if I disagree. I hate Amarcord, but love what it did to me.

[Anonymous User]

Figured I'd give this a bump.

[Anonymous User]

One more bump/addition, then I'll let it die forever.

Questions and Answers

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” At 18, I honestly had no idea. I was the first in my family to consider college and knew that I had opportunities at [College XYZ], but a career seemed far off and too limiting. My intellectual curiosity thirsted for breadth and depth. I wanted to learn everything and to be everything. This turned out to be both a gift and a curse. It was the driving force behind my education and my work ethic, but it was also the reason I had trouble figuring out what I wanted to be. I was told to simplify, simplify, simplify and not to “make things so complicated.” I needed to just pick a major and not give up, or so I was told. That’s why the next question was even more frustrating.

“How did you reach this conclusion?” I never knew how important this question would be for my future. To my freshman mind, simplicity meant easy answers. When researching, I thought my first thesis had to be the right one. After all, it was in my first and only draft that was based on the first and only book I skimmed through, but thankfully, my professors thought otherwise. On every essay, they wrote, “How did you reach this conclusion?” Each answer to that question on each rough draft led to another question which led to another page on my final draft. The harder I worked to justify my conclusion, the further away clarity, simplicity, and easy answers seemed. Eventually, I became a completist. No matter how early I started planning and researching, I was never satisfied with my papers. I felt I never got them right; instead, I just ran out of time. Routinely, I turned in essays twice the length requirement, because I wanted to address every possible question and objection to my conclusion and argument. Attention to detail and thoroughness became a way of life. Over the course of nine months spent researching and writing my 70-page honors thesis about JRR Tolkien and his view of good and evil in The Lord of the Rings, I traced Tolkien's principles through classical literature, mythology, and folklore. By the end of my senior year, I had read voraciously, even ravenously. I had written and edited constantly for four years, but still the questions remained and I felt ill-equipped to answer them.

“Why did you want to go to graduate school?” I wanted my MA in English literature, because I was not finished looking for answers. Conversely, I earned my MA, because I realized the questions that plagued me were a gift instead of a curse. During my months a research assistant on the T. S. Eliot Prose Project while working on my master’s thesis, I began to see a new topic on each page in each paragraph. There were not always satisfactory answers, but even the questions were illuminating in helping refine my research. My biggest obstacle was in deciding what to leave out of my thesis, not in what to put in. My thoroughness never abated my curiosity, but I realized it did not need to. For the first time in my life, I was comfortable with ambiguity about questions that could never be answered and complexity that could never be simplified.

“Why did you want to be a college professor?” I took my new-found conviction into teaching composition and research because I wanted to help those who were like I had been, confused and intimidated. I wanted to show that through writing, researching, and debating, we can approach the troubling questions of the world. In English, history, and many other disciplines, answers are often debatable, even interchangeable. However, it is the questions that keep scholars studying, research progressing, and the world turning. We are all attempting to ascribe some meaning to chaos, and it is only through the pursuit of knowledge and attempting to answer my own questions that I have achieved any clarity.

“Why do you want to be a lawyer?” At 30, I know what I want to be. I want to be a lawyer because there are still questions that need answering and people that need help answering them. Complexity is a virtue and law is for the virtuous. Questions of fairness, justice, and the law will dictate the kind of world we live in the 21st century and the most vulnerable members of society will need the most help in confronting these questions. As a society, we need smart, diligent, dedicated, driven, motivated, and intellectually curious people – people with diverse interests across many backgrounds beyond simply their bachelor’s degree and their pedagogy – and I want to be one of those people.

[McAvoy]

I think being cute and doing something original in a PS, even if it's done well, has more potential to do harm than good.

For the vast majority of schools your PS is used only to vet you and make sure you are not totally careless or an idiot; doing something more traditional and straightforward is a safer bet.

[CanadianWolf]

Your essay is structured in a fashion that is easy to read; unfortunately, the message received is that you're a bit naïve about lawyers & the law.