Wednesday, July 09, 2014

Vet School Application: Personal Statement

I just got back home from my appointment at the Writing Center at the university library. This is a free service available to all students. The woman that I met with told me she'd been working there for more than two years, that she's evaluated hundreds of writing projects in that time, and that my personal statement was some of the best writing she's ever seen. She was effusive.

I actually blushed and stammered. Yeah, I know.

I suppose it's because I've invested, no, the better word is risked, so much to get to this point. I wasn't prepared for praise.

After a few preliminaries, she had me read my essay out loud. This is a very nice technique--it never would have occurred to me to do this on my own.

She made some excellent suggestions to clarify a couple of muddy points. I knew those bits were weak but couldn't see my way to anything better. She suggested moving one paragraph. I wrote chronologically, nothing wrong with that, of course, but she encouraged me to see that I could recast the entire essay in a problem-solution-action format with that one move. The paragraph didn't even need to be modified all that much. Composition and rhetoric are not particularly useful when writing a scientific report. The organization of those is rigid and unchanging: abstract, introduction, methods, results. The personal statement needs to address the assigned questions and at the same time it needs to sparkle. It needs to set me apart from the other applicants and accomplish that in less than 5,000 characters.

Overall, it was time very well spent.

(No, I won't be posting the statement here. Plagiarism is practiced widely and casually by far too many students.)

2 comments:

Oldgraymare said...

Way to go! Great reward for your hard work.

Unknown said...

I think she guided you very well. It is really very tough thing to be a vet. Overall nice blog post on vet personal statement.