Possible to have a personal statement that is too graphic, horrible, or traumatizing?

[wormboge]

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I was wondering how you, or different people, decide when an admissions essay goes to far?

 

[deleted480308]

I was wondering how you, or different people, decide when an admissions essay goes to far?

if you are asking, it's too far

 

[Zharp]

I mean if it would horrify your grandmother, you probably went too far.

 

[Forever Geebs]

if you are asking, it's too far

 

[21Rush12]

How hard is it for people to grasp: just write a normal, non-offensive essay.

If I could describe the ideal personal statement in two words, they would be “pleasantly forgettable”.

Doing weird stuff doesn’t help you. When I read it I cringe and I don’t even read 1000 of these a year.

 

[Oso]

hey you gotta stand out somehow

 

[Goro]

hey you gotta stand out somehow

Makes our job a lot easier when we can deep six a bad essay writer.

 

[mk04447]

Don't listen to these guys, let it fly. Unless charges are filed, you left something on the table.

 

[LizzyM]

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [hard-core pornography]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

• Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart Concurring, Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964).

 

[siliso]

Yes. People do not want to be bummed out or secondarily traumatized by your essay. It will leave a stigma of weirdness and bummer feelings in the person who had to read it, and that stigma will transmit to your application as a whole. If you’re mentioning an adverse experience that you have overcome as part of your journey, go short on the details of the experience and long on the overcoming part.

Like “I was the victim of a violent crime in X year...” OK. If it’s relevant to your story.
“My mother unfortunately suffered a serious/terminal illness during X year of my undergraduate career...” OK, same qualifier
No vivid details are wanted or warranted.

“I have [insert psychiatric or substance use or personality disorder] and...” NO. Delete.

 

[siliso]

As a general principle your goal is to project yourself as a mature, stable, insightful person with a low risk of failing in your studies and a high probability of becoming a stable, competent professional colleague. Graphic, traumatic, or depressing essay will do nothing to project this image and will do the opposite.

 

[Forever Geebs]

Agreed with above posters!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Detective SnowBucket]

If you're writing your PS now then you'll be applying the same cycle as me In which case, I say go for it!

 

[LizzyM]

Keep in mind, too, that anything that you write about is fodder for the interview. Don't write something that you can't speak about while keeping your emotions in check. No one wants to deal with an emotionally labile applicant who dissolves in a puddle of tears while speaking of something horrific. The only thing that is worse might be somone who is so cold and detatched that they describe the horror without emotion at all. Either way you are scr3wed.

 

[TypeADissection]

To the OP: challenge accepted.

 

[FroYoOreo]

Now I am really curious what you wrote...