Graduate / Graduate Degree - opinions on Transfer Master's Student Personal Statement [4]

Hey Darry! I really like your essay. It sounds like you have gone through a lot of struggles in your life but continue to work hard to overcome them, and your essay really conveys that. However, I think you're trying to fit too much of your life history into this one essay. You have your undergraduate study, your mom's cancer and taking care of the house/ your family, freelance writing, appendix surgery, the engineering job, research/advanced materials, and other health issues during graduate school. That's a lot! I know the prompt is asking for a few things, especially difficulties you have overcome, but you really don't need everything you have included. You are using a lot of room to tell these mini stories- the problem is you have too many of them, they're all really small and short and you don't describe them each in depth, and it jumps around a lot and reads very incoherently. I can tell that you want to focus on the hardships you have overcome, but using one of your examples here is enough. And, if you use one, you can really tell the story in depth and talk about what you learned from it and how it affected you. Try to tell the story in two or three paragraphs instead of just a few sentences.

If it were my paper I think I would talk the most about what happened to get you dismissed from your graduate program. That's kind of a big deal and I think they are going to want to know what happened, why, and how you have dealt with it. They want to know what happened then, and how you have learned and grown from it that it's going to make you successful this time and not happen again.

Undergraduate / "The Significant BANG" - Common Application Essay (Significant Experience) [3]

I have to agree with @Holt here. Also, I think you are skirting around the answer instead of answering it directly. Just because you haven't had that big bang in your life that suddenly changes everything, doesn't mean you haven't had some sort of "awakening" or turning point in your life. It feels like you are trying to tell this huge life story instead of really focusing on one or two things and then fleshing them out and making them detailed.

For example:


Well there you go, that's something. That's a turning point in your life that changed the way you went about your life and the way you saw your life. However, the way you say it really does you a disservice. You focus more on how teachers said you lacked initiative and potential more than the way it affected you and helped define who you decided to be.

Undergraduate / NYU Tisch Dramatic Essay - "Hear My Notes" [6]

@Kiera9473, I see that you are working hard to make your story flow better, but I still think it's too much in one essay. you are severely limiting your storytelling capabilities by trying to do too much in a limited amount of space. I think the best part is the August 3rd sequence, and I think with some skill, you can also get in bits and pieces of the other parts too. Also, since this all happened in the past, why did you choose present tense instead of past tense?

If this were my story, I might write something like this:

Visiting my grandmother in the hospital, I couldn't help but remember her as the lively, encouraging role model she has always been to me. Even though she was pale and fragile in that hospital bed, she still cared more about me than she did about herself. I don't know how she did it. I felt so hollow I could barely form a sentence, and she was the one asking me what was wrong when it should have been the other way around. I noticed the box in the corner of her hospital room. She had brought her guitar with her even though she barely played it, and she couldn't know that that meant to me. Looking at the guitar, still in it's cheap box, I remembered the day she told me she was going to buy one. That was the same day that I decided I wanted to learn, the day my rockstar dreams were born. Ironically, my social anxiety made it hard to have even the simplest conversations in public; I knew my anxiety would add to the challenge, but my grandmother believed in me.

"Work hard in silence," she told me. "Let your success be your noise." I grew more confident with her encouragement, even though my mother wouldn't even let my get a guitar then. It didn't matter to my grandmother. In fact, she thought it would be fun to get her own guitar, too, so that we could learn together. "We could be our own little band," she told me, and though I didn't even have a guitar, I believed her. She would learn to play just for me. Those finger callouses would be worth it to her if it helped me to stop worrying and be myself.

Do you see how much more that feels like a story? I used what you wrote, but I slowed it down, and added in descriptions and actions (which you could add more). It's okay for the story to be in your head, so to speak, more than action and dialogue, but yours is so jumpy and the sentences are so choppy that it fells.... sloppy. I also changed up the order, used the last part as the beginning and then transitioned into remembering the past, and then you can go back into the future again.

Undergraduate / Common App Prompt 5 - Personal Growth through Spanish Dance [7]

Hi Ethan! Welcome to EF. I really like what you have written; it is engaging, funny, and descriptive. However, this is also the problem. It reads like a story and not like an essay. You have not discussed the event or accomplishment in essay format. You have not included what is expected, such as how this experience changed you, influenced your growth, what you learned, etc.... This prompt is really an opportunity for you to show yourself in a deeper way and how you have changed in a positive way because of this event. Your essay only focuses on the even without any of the good stuff they really want to know. You are attempting it fit all of this in in the last two lines of your essay rather than dedicating a good third of your essay to it.

If you want to stick with this story as your event/ accomplishment, think about it as it relates to the rest of the prompt. What period of transition, growth, or new thinking did this experience inspire? How did your understanding of yourself or others change because of this experience? For this specific experience, how did your dedication to this dance influence you? How did you develop as a student or as a person? It seems to me that the major developments are perseverance as a student despite dance not being of interest to you, and learning to let go a little bit and not be so methodical or analytical about everything in life. It has to be more than just doing over thinking. Be specific. Doing over thinking might be the transition and start of growth, but what is the ultimate ending where your understanding has been changed?

Also, your essay reads much too informally. I think because you are trying to tell a story instead of writing an essay.