Key Insights for Writing Personal Statements

Hey y'all, what's up? I'm the college essay guy, Ethan Sawyer. If you've never heard of me before, I'm the author of the best-selling book on college essays, College Essay Essentials, and I'm basically the dude who sits in a room for anywhere from 8 to 12 hours a day eating, sleeping, breathing, drinking college essays. And I realize how gross that sounds even as I say it. I want to take you through a crash course on the personal statement. Now, why am I doing this? Well, I think oftentimes, first of all, students don't know how to brainstorm a great personal statement topic. Second, They don't know what constitutes a great topic. They don't know how to decide if a topic is likely to work or not. Third, oftentimes students don't know how to structure their personal statement. And fourth, one of the main things I see students run into trouble with is how to end their personal statement. In this video, I'm going to cover, first of all, three different brainstorming exercises that I've used over the past, I guess, 12 years now that are pretty good at helping you develop a menu of essay topics. I'm going to give you a simple way to determine whether or not your topic is likely to help you stand out or not. I'm going to walk you through two different structures that you can use to write your personal statement. I'm going to share with you three different kinds of endings that you can use, and I'll give you some examples of those. And then finally, I'll share with you a bunch of resources where you can write your personal statement or work on the other elements of your application, and I'll link them all below this video. All right, let's do this. But first, I'm going to take a sip of water. All right, let's start with brainstorming. So I want to share with you three different exercises that I think are pretty effective at helping you develop what I call a menu of essay topics. The first one is what I call the essence objects exercise. And it's pretty simple, but I find that the effects can be pretty profound. So the way it works is I want you to imagine a set of objects that represent your essences. Now, what do I mean by this? I'm talking about objects that represent different memories, different moments, different experiences, or different values that are important to you. Let me give you some examples. So one of them I'm wearing around my neck. These are my mala beads. And these mala beads represent a lot of things to me. My connection to the friend who gave them to me. They represent a reminder to slow down, to take my time, something that I don't always do in these videos. They represent spirituality to me, my connection to myself. A lot of things. Another essence object for me would be this barbecue sauce that's sitting on my desk because, you know, I always keep barbecue sauce on my desk. Not true. This is Sweet Baby Ray's Sweet and Spicy. Not my favorite necessarily, but it's an awesome one. And I think the sweet and spicy kind of represents me now that I think about it. I don't actually love lots of spice. I actually like just a little bit of spice. That's probably too much information for you. But I just mean kind of like in life. Like I'm kind of adventurous but not like super adventurous. Another essence object would be a Game in this case, I've got Dutch Blitz, which is a card game that I love this connects to my love of competition Which you wouldn't really know about me unless you got to know me a little bit better I would probably put ping-pong on my essence objects list like a ping-pong ball to represent that It represents my connection to my friends you kind of see we're going with this So I would just write down you can if you want you can write down the object and like what it represents to you or Like what values does it connect to so? Try this and you can pause this video or if you want more examples of this you want a bunch of questions You can find them below this video But this exercise I'd say you could spend maybe 10 minutes on it spend 15 if you really want to get a lot of material And see if you can come up with as many essence objects as you can think of. Alright second exercise This one's called the values exercise and I believe values are like key to So much in this application process and in fact in life, if you can identify what your core values are, I think it's really going to help you find some common themes for your personal statement. And I actually think it's going to make you a more purposeful human being. So how do you do that? Again, link below this video, but there's a simple values exercise, which I'm going to show you right now. So if you look at this, you'll see this values list. So this is a list of, you know, I don't know, 75 or so values. And the way this exercise works is pretty simple. I want you to basically go in and spend two or three minutes and identify your top 10 values. Okay, so I'm going to pause in the first half of this and I'm going to slowly scroll down so you can go back and look at this if you want. But I want you to spend a couple minutes and see if you can pick what are your top 10 values. I'm not going to spend the whole two minutes right now pausing. You can pause the video if you want to. Obviously, you can write in some if your top values are not represented here. And then once you've identified your top... 10 values. Of those 10, I want you to pick five. You can pause the video right now if you want to do that. And then once you've picked your top five values, I want you to then pick your top three. Pause in case you want to do that. And then see if you can identify what is your number one value for today. Now, this doesn't have to be the number one value to define you for all space and time. It could just be the thing that's most present for you, that's most important to you. Okay, so this values exercise is going to connect to a lot of different things. Some of those you'll see in just a few minutes as I talk about the personal statement. But when it comes to demonstrating what you've done in your activities list on your application, or when it comes to in your supplemental essays, which is to say the essays that you'll need to write besides your personal statement if you're applying to highly selective schools, Your values list can help you see what part of me is coming through in my supplemental essays versus what part of me is coming through in my main personal statement. And there are lots of other things. Again, I think identifying your core values and being able to talk about those is going to help you just be able to communicate with folks about what you really care about and what motivates you. The third exercise that I want to share with you is called the 21 details exercise and it's dangerously simple. It's an exercise where you're basically going to, on a blank sheet of paper, come up with 21 random facts about yourself. Things that people may or may not know about you. So for example, for me, one thing that people may or may not know about me is that I grew up speaking Spanish. I'm bilingual, grew up in Spain, Ecuador, and Colombia. So I might just write down, grew up bilingual, speak Spanish fluently. Detail number two. Let me see if I can come up with another one. I love snacks. I love hosting people with snacks. I can't cook, but I feel like snacks are a way that I take care of people. Ooh, that's an insight. I just got to a value. So sometimes, not always, but your 21 details will connect to like an important value. So one of my values is taking care of people. And one of the ways I do that is through snacks. Cool. You keep going. 21 random things and just see where this takes you. Once you've done that, and in fact, once you've done these three exercises, all your essence objects, your values and your 21 details, take 10 minutes and look at your values and see where they manifest themselves in your essence objects, but also in your 21 details. Because it could be that you start to see some different themes emerging, and it could be, and it's fun to do this with somebody else, that you start to potentially hit on a couple different topics. But you're probably wondering, wait, how does that happen? And how do I know if I found a topic that's actually going to work? Let's talk about it. How do you know if your topic is the right topic? If it's more or less likely to stand out? So I've got this little test that I want to share with you, but in order to explain it, I have to give you just a glimpse into the two structures. that I'm going to talk about in a few minutes. So the first is called narrative structure, which is great for students who are writing about a challenge in their personal statement. And then you've got something called montage structure, which is for those students who are not writing about a challenge. And by the way, it's totally great and awesome to not write about a challenge in your personal statement. In fact, many of my favorite essays are montage essays that are not about a challenge. So if you're writing a montage essay, let's talk about that one first. There are two qualities that you're going to want to consider. Number one, is your topic somewhat elastic? In other words, is it stretchy enough to talk about lots of different sides of you? So for example, for me, games would be a pretty elastic topic. If I could write a pretty good games essay because I can connect it to lots of different values. I can connect it to family because I play games with my family. I can connect it to vulnerability because I think games sometimes, you know, take us to deeper, more vulnerable parts of ourselves. I can also connect it to social justice because I've seen how games can in some cases help people rethink their views of the world in ways that can be really powerful. So games might be very elastic for me, whereas barbecue sauce? Probably not a very elastic topic. I could probably connect it to family and I could probably connect it to... Something else but I don't know it's not gonna be as elastic for me something like Australian history is gonna be even less elastic because I have Almost no idea about Australian history note to self read more about Australian history The second quality you're gonna want to consider besides elasticity for a montage essay is is it common or uncommon? Now if I were to write an essay about You know games That would probably be, I don't know, it would be somewhat uncommon. I've read games essays before. Barbecue sauce would be a much more uncommon topic, but it's not going to be as elastic for me. So if I wanted to, you could consider that each of these things is not necessarily like it's definitely common or definitely uncommon. It's definitely elastic or definitely inelastic. So these aren't binary, right? It's not like yes or no. You can kind of put these on a spectrum. So imagine on an x-axis, for those of you math nerds, that you take something like elasticity. And on one end of the spectrum, we've got something like, yes, very elastic. And on the other end of the spectrum, we've got something like not very elastic. And then you've got on the Y axis going up this way, you've got something like how common is it? So let's say if it's not very common, it's down here. And if it's more uncommon, then it's more up here. Now you can kind of chart your essay topic on this graph. With topics that are more common, and less elastic down here, and topics that are more uncommon. and more elastic up here. I hope this makes sense. And what we're kind of trying to do is like, how do you know if your montage essay topic is gonna stand out? If you get like further up into the top right side of this graph, you're gonna get something like a student a couple of years ago wrote about medieval blacksmithing, which is incredibly uncommon. And he'd been doing it for long enough that he had lots of things to say about it. So that's kind of like way up here. But having said this, you don't necessarily need an uncommon topic in order to write a great essay It's very elastic. So an example of this would be a student who recently wrote about food, right? So that's a pretty common topic. Two years ago, I had three students write about food, but it was very elastic. So it connected to lots of different sides of himself. You might take a second if you've got a topic in mind or if you've done the brainstorming and ask yourself, where do I fit on this graph? Now, if you're writing a narrative essay, which is to say an essay about challenges, I want you to consider these two qualities. Number one. Is your challenge, or are your challenges, if you went through many, compelling? In other words, are they something that would be really interesting to a reader? So there are some extreme challenges, and again, you can kind of chart these on a graph with extreme challenges over here, like, you know, students I've read essays who've lived homeless for several years. Or is it more common or less compelling, like, I got a bad grade in physics, right? So you can kind of chart these on a graph. So you've got... Extreme challenges or interesting, you know, compelling challenges, we'll call them. And then on the other side of the graph, we've got insight. Could you come up with a wow insight? Or is the insight that you've come up with like, meh, you know, just so-so? And again, if you've got a topic in mind, you could ask yourself, was my challenge compelling or not so much? And is my insight, which is to say the so what, the thing I want to say about my challenge or my experience, is it compelling? Or not so much. So take a minute if you need to pause the video, or if you're working through this with somebody else, and you can ask them. Say, hey, I've got such and such a challenge that I'm writing about. Does that sound like it's further on this side of the spectrum, or more on this side of the spectrum? And then ask yourself, so what? Based on the thing that you want to say, in terms of the experiences that you had working through your challenge, and what you learned, is it a wow insight, or is it meh? And you can actually improve your insight, and I'll share that in a separate video. Now, just to clarify, even if your montage topic is somewhat common, or even if your narrative essay insights are just so-so at this point, you can still write a great personal statement. It might still make a good topic. It might just take you a little bit longer to figure out how that montage topic connects to different sides of you, or what were the deeper insights that you gained from the challenge that you experienced. So don't just throw your topic out because it's one of those things. I just want to give you a way of thinking about it and give you a sense of how long it might take you to write your essay. By the way, I find the best essays take oftentimes more than five drafts, sometimes many more. It depends on how much work you want to put in on this process. Alright, let's talk about structuring. Now I mentioned briefly these two types of structure, montage structure and narrative structure. And broadly speaking, montage essays, like I said, are not about challenges. Narrative essays tend to be about challenges. So let's first talk about montage. A montage broadly speaking, is basically jumping around in space and time, but connecting it through some kind of common thematic thread. Now, I found that there are actually seven different types of montage essay that you could potentially write on. Number one, there's the I love or I know path. And this means choosing something that you either love or know a lot about, like, for example, games, and connecting it to many different sides of you. Second, we've got something called the skill or superpower path. And that could be something that you're really good at. Say, for example, listening. Or maybe it's, you know, your job, you're really good at bringing people together. And you could talk about in your essay how there are all these different ways that you're able to bring people together. The third technique is what we call the essence objects path, or the stuff in my room essay. And that involves taking all these different objects, talking about how each one reveals some different side of you, and, you know, basically doing a paragraph on each one of the objects. The fourth one is the career path. The career path basically involves deciding what are the things of a career that I want to go into and naming it at the end of your essay and giving basically a series of different moments, experiences, examples that give a sense of what are the values you've developed that have led you to be interested in that career. The fifth one is what I call the identities path and that involves naming lots of different identities that you claim. For example, you know, I identify as a father, I identify as a teacher, I identify as a jazz lover. I identify as a ping pong player, not like professionally, but a games lover. There's another one. So you can talk in each paragraph about some different side of you. The sixth one is what I call the home path. So you talk about a place. right, that connects to many different sides of you. Like, you know, when I'm behind my laptop coding and the coding, you know, that home connects to many different sides of me. Or you can talk about different homes, like behind my laptop is a home for me. Or when I'm on the soccer field, that's a home for me. Or when I'm on stage performing, that's a home. And you could do a paragraph for each of those different homes. And then the seventh path is the uncommon extracurricular activity path. Now, I say uncommon extracurricular activity because I don't actually recommend that you do that. that you write your personal statement on a common extracurricular activity. What do I mean by common extracurricular activity? I'm talking about things like, you know, common sports like soccer, football, volleyball, lacrosse. I'm talking about common instruments like piano, you know, flute, the guitar. You know, these are things that students write about a lot. I think it's really good to save those extracurricular activities for your supplemental essays, which is, as I briefly mentioned earlier, the different types of essays that you'll need to write for a specific in many cases selective schools. So what are some examples of uncommon extracurricular activities? Maybe you collect coins or stamps which is like now pretty old school or maybe like donuts are your thing. and you know your thing is like making them and sharing them with your friends and there's all these different things and how it connects to all these different sides of you. It can go on and on with all kinds of uncommon extracurricular activities. Students have written about everything from parkour to beekeeping to all kinds of things. That's the seventh type of montage essay and any of those can work. No particular type is better than another. When it comes to narrative structure, I'm going to keep it much more simple and I'm going to say that if you're writing about challenges, basically your essay needs these three elements. Number one, what was the challenge you faced and the impacts of that challenge on your life? I know that's kind of two things, but consider it challenges and effects. That's what needs to be in the first third of your essay. Then we need to understand what did you do about it? How did you work through these challenges? That's part two. And then part three is what did you learn from this experience? Pause this video if you want to jot those down. First, challenges and effects. Two, what did you do about it? Three, what did you learn? Some quick tips on writing the narrative style essay. Number one, there's an exercise linked below this video called the feelings and needs exercise. And it's about a 20-minute exercise that if you've got a challenge that you're thinking about writing about, you can work through that exercise and get a sense of how this would map out into a personal statement. That's the first thing. Second, if you're not sure if what you want to write about is a good challenge or not, one of the things to ask is, do I have enough to say about what I did about it and what I learned? Because sometimes students are still really in the challenge. Oftentimes this happens with say mental health issues or other struggles and it's hard to write about it looking into the past because they're like, well, I'm still facing this challenge. So ask yourself, could I make one-third about the challenge, one-third what I did and one-third what I learned? Ish. That's not like a perfect, you know, budget for you. The third thing is ask yourself, am I forcing this challenge? Like am I writing about this topic because either A, I feel like I should because someone told me that challenges make for better essays Or maybe because you read a past essay that you really liked and it was on a challenge and you're like, oh, I want the reader to feel what I felt when I read that. I just want you to know that there are so many other options. All of those montage options I mentioned are totally legit and they can make for a great essay. Finally, let's talk a little bit about endings. Here are three techniques that are going to help you end your essay when it comes to that. The first one is what I call book ending or the callback. And you'll be familiar with this from like certain stand-up routines where a comedian, Dave Chappelle, does this a lot, will mention something at the start of their set and then at the very, like close to the end, they'll re-reference that joke. so that everybody laughs and they're like, oh yeah, I remember that. It's like, they call it a callback. And the value of this is that it gives the, in the case of stand-up set or of your essay, it gives it a circular feel and it creates kind of like an inside joke you can refer back to. Let me give you a quick example from an essay. All right, so this essay begins, I have been pooped on many times. Kind of a nice hook, draws our attention, makes us wonder what, what's happening, what's going on. I mean this in the most literal sense possible. I've been pooped on by pigeons and possums, house finches and hawks, egrets and eastern greys. So that's how it begins. This author then goes on to talk about how this happened. She's worked in a vet office, works with animals, has gotten really involved in the environment, interested in issues of environmental justice. She ends her essay with this. The upshot is that I simply can't walk away from injustice, however uncomfortable it is to confront it. I choose to act, taking a stand and exposing the truth in the most effective manner that I think is possible. And while I'm sure I'll be dumped on many times, both literally and metaphorically, call back to the beginning. I won't do the same to others. So she does a nice thing where she comes back to the beginning. Yes, I'm probably going to be pooped on in like, you know, literal and metaphoric ways, but I'm not going to do that to other people. So that gives us a core value that's important to her is, you know, taking care of others, whether it's other people or the environment. The next ending technique is called the why us setup. Now, the why us essay is an essay that sometimes students have to write for highly selective schools. And it basically asks, why do you want to attend our school? And the way this works is you basically write your personal statement as a kind of origin story, setting up how you became interested, oftentimes in a particular career or major. And then in part two. which is the sequel, which is the Why Us essay, you go into detail on how you're going to explore that career using the resources at a particular institution, a particular university. So here's the ending to this student's essay. By the way, just to give you the context, she writes about an Instagram post that she made that kind of, you know, created a big hullabaloo at her, I never use the word hullabaloo, but whatever, at her Catholic school, because she posted about reproductive rights, and it created this big thing, and that led her on a journey to basically become more of an activist. Here's the ending of her essay. My role model, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, says, Dissenters speak to a future age. They're writing not for today, but for tomorrow. Retrospectively, I realized that the post, in other words, the Instagram post she made, was my voice of dissent. Through it, I initiated a campus-wide discussion and openly challenged the majority opinion of my school for the first time. As I aspire to become a civil rights attorney, first time she's mentioned this in the essay, and the first Asian woman on the Supreme Court, I hope it doesn't take that long. I'm confident that I will continue to write and speak out for justice for tomorrow."And then what she does in her why us statement, she was applying for example to Michigan, she talks about how, hey, I'm interested in becoming a civil rights attorney, here's how the resources at Michigan are going to help me do that. Okay, so again, you kind of think of this one as an origin story. Oftentimes, this works well for narrative structure. So, the third ending technique, and this works either for montage or for narrative structure, is just ending with your values. And the way this works is basically writing your body paragraphs in a way that doesn't explicitly name your values, or at least not too much, and then you bring them in at the ending. Now, in the essay example that I'll look at in just a second, the student starts with being asked the question of like, what is your religion? What is your faith? And how uncomfortable he got when he would be asked that. And he went through this exploration in his personal statement talking about why that made him uncomfortable, how it connected to his family, you know, culture. And then at the end, here's what he says. When asked about my faith now, I still feel hot. My heart still quickens. Yet, now I'm able to recognize why I find my faith valuable. Great. So he set up why. And a great ending, no matter what style you're writing, should answer the question, why or so what? It has helped me to connect with my heritage. foster my sense of charity and civic duty, and better appreciate the unique importance of human values. It's with faith in those human values that I look towards a future in which the abilities of machines far outstrip my own and remain resolved to realize a future that's not only technologically advanced but also morally sound."Beautiful language in there and some insights into what he's interested in doing in the future. He was interested in working with artificial intelligence, AI. Right now the key to making this one work is like I said earlier you want to not explicitly name your values throughout You want to kind of save the explicit mention of those values for the ending so that it'll feel surprising But inevitable and that's the key to a great ending. Hey friends. I know that was a ton of content Don't worry. You can find lots more at college essay guy comm including sample essays more brainstorming exercises and pretty much every part of the application process if you've got any questions or you'd like me to cover something in a future video Throw it into the comments below. If you like this video, you can hit like. There's a button for that. And what else? Oh, if you want to subscribe, you'll get more videos. Have an awesome everything.

And I realize how gross that sounds even as I say it. I want to take you through a crash course on the personal statement. Now, why am I doing this?

Well, I think oftentimes, first of all, students don't know how to brainstorm a great personal statement topic. Second, They don't know what constitutes a great topic. They don't know how to decide if a topic is likely to work or not.

Third, oftentimes students don't know how to structure their personal statement. And fourth, one of the main things I see students run into trouble with is how to end their personal statement. In this video, I'm going to cover, first of all, three different brainstorming exercises that I've used over the past, I guess, 12 years now that are pretty good at helping you develop a menu of essay topics.

I'm going to give you a simple way to determine whether or not your topic is likely to help you stand out or not. I'm going to walk you through two different structures that you can use to write your personal statement. I'm going to share with you three different kinds of endings that you can use, and I'll give you some examples of those.

And then finally, I'll share with you a bunch of resources where you can write your personal statement or work on the other elements of your application, and I'll link them all below this video. All right, let's do this. But first, I'm going to take a sip of water. All right, let's start with brainstorming.

So I want to share with you three different exercises that I think are pretty effective at helping you develop what I call a menu of essay topics. The first one is what I call the essence objects exercise. And it's pretty simple, but I find that the effects can be pretty profound.

So the way it works is I want you to imagine a set of objects that represent your essences. Now, what do I mean by this? I'm talking about objects that represent different memories, different moments, different experiences, or different values that are important to you. Let me give you some examples. So one of them I'm wearing around my neck.

These are my mala beads. And these mala beads represent a lot of things to me. My connection to the friend who gave them to me.

They represent a reminder to slow down, to take my time, something that I don't always do in these videos. They represent spirituality to me, my connection to myself. A lot of things.

Another essence object for me would be this barbecue sauce that's sitting on my desk because, you know, I always keep barbecue sauce on my desk. Not true. This is Sweet Baby Ray's Sweet and Spicy.

Not my favorite necessarily, but it's an awesome one. And I think the sweet and spicy kind of represents me now that I think about it. I don't actually love lots of spice.

I actually like just a little bit of spice. That's probably too much information for you. But I just mean kind of like in life.

Like I'm kind of adventurous but not like super adventurous. Another essence object would be a Game in this case, I've got Dutch Blitz, which is a card game that I love this connects to my love of competition Which you wouldn't really know about me unless you got to know me a little bit better I would probably put ping-pong on my essence objects list like a ping-pong ball to represent that It represents my connection to my friends you kind of see we're going with this So I would just write down you can if you want you can write down the object and like what it represents to you or Like what values does it connect to so? Try this and you can pause this video or if you want more examples of this you want a bunch of questions You can find them below this video But this exercise I'd say you could spend maybe 10 minutes on it spend 15 if you really want to get a lot of material And see if you can come up with as many essence objects as you can think of. Alright second exercise This one's called the values exercise and I believe values are like key to So much in this application process and in fact in life, if you can identify what your core values are, I think it's really going to help you find some common themes for your personal statement. And I actually think it's going to make you a more purposeful human being.

So how do you do that? Again, link below this video, but there's a simple values exercise, which I'm going to show you right now. So if you look at this, you'll see this values list.

So this is a list of, you know, I don't know, 75 or so values. And the way this exercise works is pretty simple. I want you to basically go in and spend two or three minutes and identify your top 10 values.

Okay, so I'm going to pause in the first half of this and I'm going to slowly scroll down so you can go back and look at this if you want. But I want you to spend a couple minutes and see if you can pick what are your top 10 values. I'm not going to spend the whole two minutes right now pausing. You can pause the video if you want to. Obviously, you can write in some if your top values are not represented here.

And then once you've identified your top... 10 values. Of those 10, I want you to pick five.

You can pause the video right now if you want to do that. And then once you've picked your top five values, I want you to then pick your top three. Pause in case you want to do that.

And then see if you can identify what is your number one value for today. Now, this doesn't have to be the number one value to define you for all space and time. It could just be the thing that's most present for you, that's most important to you.

Okay, so this values exercise is going to connect to a lot of different things. Some of those you'll see in just a few minutes as I talk about the personal statement. But when it comes to demonstrating what you've done in your activities list on your application, or when it comes to in your supplemental essays, which is to say the essays that you'll need to write besides your personal statement if you're applying to highly selective schools, Your values list can help you see what part of me is coming through in my supplemental essays versus what part of me is coming through in my main personal statement.

And there are lots of other things. Again, I think identifying your core values and being able to talk about those is going to help you just be able to communicate with folks about what you really care about and what motivates you. The third exercise that I want to share with you is called the 21 details exercise and it's dangerously simple. It's an exercise where you're basically going to, on a blank sheet of paper, come up with 21 random facts about yourself.

Things that people may or may not know about you. So for example, for me, one thing that people may or may not know about me is that I grew up speaking Spanish. I'm bilingual, grew up in Spain, Ecuador, and Colombia.

So I might just write down, grew up bilingual, speak Spanish fluently. Detail number two. Let me see if I can come up with another one.

I love snacks. I love hosting people with snacks. I can't cook, but I feel like snacks are a way that I take care of people.

Ooh, that's an insight. I just got to a value. So sometimes, not always, but your 21 details will connect to like an important value. So one of my values is taking care of people.

And one of the ways I do that is through snacks. Cool. You keep going. 21 random things and just see where this takes you.

Once you've done that, and in fact, once you've done these three exercises, all your essence objects, your values and your 21 details, take 10 minutes and look at your values and see where they manifest themselves in your essence objects, but also in your 21 details. Because it could be that you start to see some different themes emerging, and it could be, and it's fun to do this with somebody else, that you start to potentially hit on a couple different topics. But you're probably wondering, wait, how does that happen?

And how do I know if I found a topic that's actually going to work? Let's talk about it. How do you know if your topic is the right topic?

If it's more or less likely to stand out? So I've got this little test that I want to share with you, but in order to explain it, I have to give you just a glimpse into the two structures. that I'm going to talk about in a few minutes.

So the first is called narrative structure, which is great for students who are writing about a challenge in their personal statement. And then you've got something called montage structure, which is for those students who are not writing about a challenge. And by the way, it's totally great and awesome to not write about a challenge in your personal statement. In fact, many of my favorite essays are montage essays that are not about a challenge. So if you're writing a montage essay, let's talk about that one first.

There are two qualities that you're going to want to consider. Number one, is your topic somewhat elastic? In other words, is it stretchy enough to talk about lots of different sides of you?

So for example, for me, games would be a pretty elastic topic. If I could write a pretty good games essay because I can connect it to lots of different values. I can connect it to family because I play games with my family. I can connect it to vulnerability because I think games sometimes, you know, take us to deeper, more vulnerable parts of ourselves. I can also connect it to social justice because I've seen how games can in some cases help people rethink their views of the world in ways that can be really powerful.

So games might be very elastic for me, whereas barbecue sauce? Probably not a very elastic topic. I could probably connect it to family and I could probably connect it to...

Something else but I don't know it's not gonna be as elastic for me something like Australian history is gonna be even less elastic because I have Almost no idea about Australian history note to self read more about Australian history The second quality you're gonna want to consider besides elasticity for a montage essay is is it common or uncommon? Now if I were to write an essay about You know games That would probably be, I don't know, it would be somewhat uncommon. I've read games essays before. Barbecue sauce would be a much more uncommon topic, but it's not going to be as elastic for me. So if I wanted to, you could consider that each of these things is not necessarily like it's definitely common or definitely uncommon.

It's definitely elastic or definitely inelastic. So these aren't binary, right? It's not like yes or no. You can kind of put these on a spectrum. So imagine on an x-axis, for those of you math nerds, that you take something like elasticity.

And on one end of the spectrum, we've got something like, yes, very elastic. And on the other end of the spectrum, we've got something like not very elastic. And then you've got on the Y axis going up this way, you've got something like how common is it? So let's say if it's not very common, it's down here.

And if it's more uncommon, then it's more up here. Now you can kind of chart your essay topic on this graph. With topics that are more common, and less elastic down here, and topics that are more uncommon. and more elastic up here.

I hope this makes sense. And what we're kind of trying to do is like, how do you know if your montage essay topic is gonna stand out? If you get like further up into the top right side of this graph, you're gonna get something like a student a couple of years ago wrote about medieval blacksmithing, which is incredibly uncommon. And he'd been doing it for long enough that he had lots of things to say about it.

So that's kind of like way up here. But having said this, you don't necessarily need an uncommon topic in order to write a great essay It's very elastic. So an example of this would be a student who recently wrote about food, right? So that's a pretty common topic. Two years ago, I had three students write about food, but it was very elastic.

So it connected to lots of different sides of himself. You might take a second if you've got a topic in mind or if you've done the brainstorming and ask yourself, where do I fit on this graph? Now, if you're writing a narrative essay, which is to say an essay about challenges, I want you to consider these two qualities.

Number one. Is your challenge, or are your challenges, if you went through many, compelling? In other words, are they something that would be really interesting to a reader?

So there are some extreme challenges, and again, you can kind of chart these on a graph with extreme challenges over here, like, you know, students I've read essays who've lived homeless for several years. Or is it more common or less compelling, like, I got a bad grade in physics, right? So you can kind of chart these on a graph. So you've got...

Extreme challenges or interesting, you know, compelling challenges, we'll call them. And then on the other side of the graph, we've got insight. Could you come up with a wow insight?

Or is the insight that you've come up with like, meh, you know, just so-so? And again, if you've got a topic in mind, you could ask yourself, was my challenge compelling or not so much? And is my insight, which is to say the so what, the thing I want to say about my challenge or my experience, is it compelling? Or not so much.

So take a minute if you need to pause the video, or if you're working through this with somebody else, and you can ask them. Say, hey, I've got such and such a challenge that I'm writing about. Does that sound like it's further on this side of the spectrum, or more on this side of the spectrum?

And then ask yourself, so what? Based on the thing that you want to say, in terms of the experiences that you had working through your challenge, and what you learned, is it a wow insight, or is it meh? And you can actually improve your insight, and I'll share that in a separate video.

Now, just to clarify, even if your montage topic is somewhat common, or even if your narrative essay insights are just so-so at this point, you can still write a great personal statement. It might still make a good topic. It might just take you a little bit longer to figure out how that montage topic connects to different sides of you, or what were the deeper insights that you gained from the challenge that you experienced.

So don't just throw your topic out because it's one of those things. I just want to give you a way of thinking about it and give you a sense of how long it might take you to write your essay. By the way, I find the best essays take oftentimes more than five drafts, sometimes many more.

It depends on how much work you want to put in on this process. Alright, let's talk about structuring. Now I mentioned briefly these two types of structure, montage structure and narrative structure.

And broadly speaking, montage essays, like I said, are not about challenges. Narrative essays tend to be about challenges. So let's first talk about montage.

A montage broadly speaking, is basically jumping around in space and time, but connecting it through some kind of common thematic thread. Now, I found that there are actually seven different types of montage essay that you could potentially write on. Number one, there's the I love or I know path.

And this means choosing something that you either love or know a lot about, like, for example, games, and connecting it to many different sides of you. Second, we've got something called the skill or superpower path. And that could be something that you're really good at.

Say, for example, listening. Or maybe it's, you know, your job, you're really good at bringing people together. And you could talk about in your essay how there are all these different ways that you're able to bring people together.

The third technique is what we call the essence objects path, or the stuff in my room essay. And that involves taking all these different objects, talking about how each one reveals some different side of you, and, you know, basically doing a paragraph on each one of the objects. The fourth one is the career path.

The career path basically involves deciding what are the things of a career that I want to go into and naming it at the end of your essay and giving basically a series of different moments, experiences, examples that give a sense of what are the values you've developed that have led you to be interested in that career. The fifth one is what I call the identities path and that involves naming lots of different identities that you claim. For example, you know, I identify as a father, I identify as a teacher, I identify as a jazz lover.

I identify as a ping pong player, not like professionally, but a games lover. There's another one. So you can talk in each paragraph about some different side of you.

The sixth one is what I call the home path. So you talk about a place. right, that connects to many different sides of you. Like, you know, when I'm behind my laptop coding and the coding, you know, that home connects to many different sides of me.

Or you can talk about different homes, like behind my laptop is a home for me. Or when I'm on the soccer field, that's a home for me. Or when I'm on stage performing, that's a home.

And you could do a paragraph for each of those different homes. And then the seventh path is the uncommon extracurricular activity path. Now, I say uncommon extracurricular activity because I don't actually recommend that you do that. that you write your personal statement on a common extracurricular activity.

What do I mean by common extracurricular activity? I'm talking about things like, you know, common sports like soccer, football, volleyball, lacrosse. I'm talking about common instruments like piano, you know, flute, the guitar. You know, these are things that students write about a lot.

I think it's really good to save those extracurricular activities for your supplemental essays, which is, as I briefly mentioned earlier, the different types of essays that you'll need to write for a specific in many cases selective schools. So what are some examples of uncommon extracurricular activities? Maybe you collect coins or stamps which is like now pretty old school or maybe like donuts are your thing. and you know your thing is like making them and sharing them with your friends and there's all these different things and how it connects to all these different sides of you. It can go on and on with all kinds of uncommon extracurricular activities.

Students have written about everything from parkour to beekeeping to all kinds of things. That's the seventh type of montage essay and any of those can work. No particular type is better than another.

When it comes to narrative structure, I'm going to keep it much more simple and I'm going to say that if you're writing about challenges, basically your essay needs these three elements. Number one, what was the challenge you faced and the impacts of that challenge on your life? I know that's kind of two things, but consider it challenges and effects.

That's what needs to be in the first third of your essay. Then we need to understand what did you do about it? How did you work through these challenges? That's part two.

And then part three is what did you learn from this experience? Pause this video if you want to jot those down. First, challenges and effects. Two, what did you do about it? Three, what did you learn?

Some quick tips on writing the narrative style essay. Number one, there's an exercise linked below this video called the feelings and needs exercise. And it's about a 20-minute exercise that if you've got a challenge that you're thinking about writing about, you can work through that exercise and get a sense of how this would map out into a personal statement. That's the first thing. Second, if you're not sure if what you want to write about is a good challenge or not, one of the things to ask is, do I have enough to say about what I did about it and what I learned?

Because sometimes students are still really in the challenge. Oftentimes this happens with say mental health issues or other struggles and it's hard to write about it looking into the past because they're like, well, I'm still facing this challenge. So ask yourself, could I make one-third about the challenge, one-third what I did and one-third what I learned? Ish.

That's not like a perfect, you know, budget for you. The third thing is ask yourself, am I forcing this challenge? Like am I writing about this topic because either A, I feel like I should because someone told me that challenges make for better essays Or maybe because you read a past essay that you really liked and it was on a challenge and you're like, oh, I want the reader to feel what I felt when I read that.

I just want you to know that there are so many other options. All of those montage options I mentioned are totally legit and they can make for a great essay. Finally, let's talk a little bit about endings.

Here are three techniques that are going to help you end your essay when it comes to that. The first one is what I call book ending or the callback. And you'll be familiar with this from like certain stand-up routines where a comedian, Dave Chappelle, does this a lot, will mention something at the start of their set and then at the very, like close to the end, they'll re-reference that joke. so that everybody laughs and they're like, oh yeah, I remember that.

It's like, they call it a callback. And the value of this is that it gives the, in the case of stand-up set or of your essay, it gives it a circular feel and it creates kind of like an inside joke you can refer back to. Let me give you a quick example from an essay.

All right, so this essay begins, I have been pooped on many times. Kind of a nice hook, draws our attention, makes us wonder what, what's happening, what's going on. I mean this in the most literal sense possible.

I've been pooped on by pigeons and possums, house finches and hawks, egrets and eastern greys. So that's how it begins. This author then goes on to talk about how this happened.

She's worked in a vet office, works with animals, has gotten really involved in the environment, interested in issues of environmental justice. She ends her essay with this. The upshot is that I simply can't walk away from injustice, however uncomfortable it is to confront it. I choose to act, taking a stand and exposing the truth in the most effective manner that I think is possible. And while I'm sure I'll be dumped on many times, both literally and metaphorically, call back to the beginning.

I won't do the same to others. So she does a nice thing where she comes back to the beginning. Yes, I'm probably going to be pooped on in like, you know, literal and metaphoric ways, but I'm not going to do that to other people.

So that gives us a core value that's important to her is, you know, taking care of others, whether it's other people or the environment. The next ending technique is called the why us setup. Now, the why us essay is an essay that sometimes students have to write for highly selective schools. And it basically asks, why do you want to attend our school?

And the way this works is you basically write your personal statement as a kind of origin story, setting up how you became interested, oftentimes in a particular career or major. And then in part two. which is the sequel, which is the Why Us essay, you go into detail on how you're going to explore that career using the resources at a particular institution, a particular university. So here's the ending to this student's essay.

By the way, just to give you the context, she writes about an Instagram post that she made that kind of, you know, created a big hullabaloo at her, I never use the word hullabaloo, but whatever, at her Catholic school, because she posted about reproductive rights, and it created this big thing, and that led her on a journey to basically become more of an activist. Here's the ending of her essay. My role model, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, says, Dissenters speak to a future age.

They're writing not for today, but for tomorrow. Retrospectively, I realized that the post, in other words, the Instagram post she made, was my voice of dissent. Through it, I initiated a campus-wide discussion and openly challenged the majority opinion of my school for the first time. As I aspire to become a civil rights attorney, first time she's mentioned this in the essay, and the first Asian woman on the Supreme Court, I hope it doesn't take that long. I'm confident that I will continue to write and speak out for justice for tomorrow."And then what she does in her why us statement, she was applying for example to Michigan, she talks about how, hey, I'm interested in becoming a civil rights attorney, here's how the resources at Michigan are going to help me do that. Okay, so again, you kind of think of this one as an origin story. Oftentimes, this works well for narrative structure. So, the third ending technique, and this works either for montage or for narrative structure, is just ending with your values. And the way this works is basically writing your body paragraphs in a way that doesn't explicitly name your values, or at least not too much, and then you bring them in at the ending. Now, in the essay example that I'll look at in just a second, the student starts with being asked the question of like, what is your religion? What is your faith? And how uncomfortable he got when he would be asked that. And he went through this exploration in his personal statement talking about why that made him uncomfortable, how it connected to his family, you know, culture. And then at the end, here's what he says. When asked about my faith now, I still feel hot. My heart still quickens. Yet, now I'm able to recognize why I find my faith valuable. Great. So he set up why. And a great ending, no matter what style you're writing, should answer the question, why or so what? It has helped me to connect with my heritage. foster my sense of charity and civic duty, and better appreciate the unique importance of human values. It's with faith in those human values that I look towards a future in which the abilities of machines far outstrip my own and remain resolved to realize a future that's not only technologically advanced but also morally sound."Beautiful language in there and some insights into what he's interested in doing in the future.

He was interested in working with artificial intelligence, AI. Right now the key to making this one work is like I said earlier you want to not explicitly name your values throughout You want to kind of save the explicit mention of those values for the ending so that it'll feel surprising But inevitable and that's the key to a great ending. Hey friends.

I know that was a ton of content Don't worry. You can find lots more at college essay guy comm including sample essays more brainstorming exercises and pretty much every part of the application process if you've got any questions or you'd like me to cover something in a future video Throw it into the comments below. If you like this video, you can hit like.

There's a button for that. And what else? Oh, if you want to subscribe, you'll get more videos.

Have an awesome everything.

Transcript for:Key Insights for Writing Personal Statements

Transcript for:
Key Insights for Writing Personal Statements