Personal Statements Suck
Cutthroat boarding school interviews.
Life-consuming college applications.
A controversial essay about obsessing over getting into the “perfect college,” published in Newsweek magazine when she was still in high school.
Screening thousands of college application essays (a.k.a. personal statements) through her job at Yale University’s admissions office.
These are just some of the experiences that color writer Hannah Friedman’s experience with education.
In 2009, Friedman published Everything Sucks: Losing My Mind and Finding Myself in a High School Quest for Cool, a frank memoir of her teenage years at a prestigious boarding prep high school and the ruthless college application process that created a frenzy among her senior classmates. College degree now in hand, the 24-year-old is working on her second book, which will discuss the pitfalls of standardized testing and other evaluation methods that she argues fail to help students succeed.
Hannah took some time to chat with BetterGrads and lend her thoughts on the college application process, writing a personal statement and how we evaluate student success.
Here are some highlights from our conversation:
How honest should a student be in a college application essay or personal statement?
You want to be as honest as is prudent.
I think that inherent in the process is this collapsing of a person into pages and numbers, and you have to kind of go with that. You have to work your angles so that you can communicate all of your uniqueness in that very limited format.
From the admissions point of view, we definitely wanted to see people who were unique and who expressed themselves in a way that stood out. But nobody wants to hear your radical views for overthrowing the government. You wanna be unique to a point. You wanna be PC [politically-correct] unique, which is kind of disappointing, because it would be nice to think that there’s a school that really wants to embrace the full you, but because there are so many applicants, more than ever before. There’s just not enough time for one person to absorb the beautiful uniqueness of thousands and thousands of people.
Unfortunately, you have to really be your own PR agent. And you have to boil everything about you that’s unique down into this pitch, essentially.
Which personal statements stood out in your experience working at Yale Admissions?
I’ll tell you about one that didn’t work but that definitely stood out. There was a guy who … was a carver. And so he did an application essay on his handicrafts and his tool and his woodworking, and he mailed us a canoe. A real huge 7-foot-long canoe! And it sat in the office. We were like, “What do we do with this?” He air mailed it. It must have cost him God knows how much money. It was enormous. It was bigger than me. That was an example of how it was a lot of love and time and effort, and he really was trying to show his passion, but it just did not go over well. It was a grand gesture, but it was not well received. That’s an example of going too far to show that you are unique.
Then there was someone who did a graphic novel as an essay, and I think that can go either way. It can be a total disaster, or if it’s really well-crafted and interesting and thoughtful, it can really make a big impression. There was one that stands out in my mind that was pretty great. And that did go well. They let him in.
What did you write in your personal statement?
I wrote about my grandma and theater, and how it was important to me growing up. That was my personal statement. The personal statements that really fly are usually very personal. If people try to talk about their view on like, Marxist philosophy, that gets really old really fast.
I would try to be as candid as possible, but also, with that second side of: “Is this gonna make me seem like a crazy person, or a good asset to the university?”
When you’re reading so many formulaic kinds of things, it stands out when someone attempts to be genuine. But then, it can go a little bit over the top. … This sounds really flippant, but sometimes it’s too personal. And then it’s not so much about the student, and it seems like a sob story, and that doesn’t work either. It’s hard!
What do you think stands out about this generation (Gen Y, millennials)?
I would say the merits of this generation are that we are global. We are a global generation, we have access to the Internet and to each other in a way that is unprecedented in the history of the world. In the best scenario, hopefully that will lead to more empathy, more intellectual curiosity. You don’t need to ask permission to learn things. It’s just all at your fingertips. I’m hoping that will lead to a more compassionate generation.
What’s next for you?
I’m working on another book about educational evaluation. Basically how the whole grading system was invented to expedite the evaluation process and not to help students.
The whole system that has emerged from linearly ranking students is awful, and I think it’s bad for the kids who don’t get good grades because they’re constantly told that they’re stupid. And it’s bad for the kids who do get good grades because it becomes this addictive validation, and you don’t really know how to be happy. You just know how to follow rules really well.
Education has become a business, and I don’t think it’s in the best interest of the students. The SATs, Princeton Review, Kaplan, the GSE, the Regents. All of these tests, all of these evaluation methods, they have billion-dollar industries supporting just this test. I mean, you don’t achieve anything, you don’t gain anything from taking the test. You just kind of go over this hurdle. But it’s become this major milestone in education, and now we value it really highly just because everyone else values it really highly.
Hannah Friedman is the author of teen memoir Everything Sucks, winner of the 2007 Yale Playwright’s Festival and the 2008 NY Television Festival, star of the Lifetime original series Flying Solo, and she remains one of the youngest people ever to be published in Newsweek magazine for an article that shared her insight into the college application process. She received a bachelor of arts degree in theater studies from Yale University in 2008.
