pnasty said:
What exactly would one even say in an appeal letter? Thank you for taking the time to consider my app, but please take some more time? I'm asking seriously cause I may have to write one of these.
hi pnasty,
good question. i sometimes feel so fake sometimes, writing personal statements, LOIs, etc., and i think appeals would be the same thing. i mean it's really easy to sound trite...but then again i just know there's a way to make it sound sincere and to reeeelly win them over, if you know how to use the right words...unfortunately i don't.
in my LOI to UCSF i basically said i was writing to express my strong, continued interest in the school, in the hopes they'd decide to interview me. i told them i grew up in the city, had a lot of experiences that really drew me to the kinds of people and communities in it, the ways they interacted. how i really wanted to build on the connections i've made here, how i liked that i'd still have the chinese community to work in and for, and tried to show that i'd bring a great appreciation for the language and culture, too...
and i talked about my aspirations, my interest in emotional health and possibly psychiatry because of my desire to be someone people can trust, and because emotions have always kinda been at the tip of my mind...stuff like that. tried to tie this all in with a lot of the people i've talked to at UCSF, and the atmosphere i saw...how the curriculum and the international opportunities (e.g. the area of concentration in global health) would help me kinda step outside the life i've had here, while getting to know my home from a new perspective, and maybe start a project of my own...
and finally i ended just saying i hoped i'd convinced them i'd be happy here, and that i had something, some sort of enthusiasm, to offer too. and of course i thanked them for their consideration.
so anyway i know that's not exactly an appeal letter, but i imagine much of the same stuff would go in that...EXCEPT i think you should probably focus a bit more on what you feel you didn't manage to get across in the interview or essay or whatever, and what you'd like them to know that they didn't know before...maybe you've done something since then, or developed a new perspective on things, or whatever...but you don't have to stress how you've changed so much, because that would show you kind of have little faith in the quality of your application so far. maybe you could just slip it in, and then focus more on your continued faith and assurance that this is the right school for you. just knowing you have so much enthusiasm for it might tip the scale: the better their students feel about the school, the more they'll get from their students, i think...
hope some of that helps.
🙂 good luck!
patty
