One of the finest personal statement prompts appears in Stanford’s Knight-Hennessy scholarship application. Rather than pose a predictable variation upon the conventional query “who are you,” the Knight-Hennessy issues a directive: Connect the dots. I prefer this prompt for so many reasons, foremost, as it exhorts the young writer to hone in on perspective. Once more, art provides a perfect metaphor to clarify just how critical the technique of perspective is to the task of the personal statement (or, indeed, any creative writing endeavor.)
Take, for example, Caillebotte’s Parisian scene above. In eschewing mathematical precision, linear perspective, the artist evokes in the viewer his own subjective experience. Caillebotte’s personal representation is quite distinct from a mathematically precise account and the choice he makes is a technical one. He has deliberately presented the scene through a curvilinear lens. Employing the curved perspective of the naked human eye, Caillebotte encompasses all that he is perceiving and thus too his own idiosyncratic sensation. Such choice allows us to know the mind of the artist intimately, if in a flash. And, as it is momentary knowledge, we are left wishing to see and to know more.
Perspective as a literary tool functions in precisely the same way. It is for this reason the Stanford prompt is brilliant, nudging the writer toward a perspective-based account. The student must look back across the events and experiences of their life and discern a pattern, a distilled scene that only they themselves can know: e.g. A child lying under the stars of a country sky, bewildered at beauty and in a state of exultant wonder, may well predict the curiosity of a future physicist.
In tracing a line between fractal life events, those moments that, from a straight chronological perspective, might never be incorporated within the frame, the writer grants the reader momentary entrance into his mind. It is from such curved perspective – Welty’s so-called “threads of revelation” – that compelling stories originate. Take heed of that standard editorial remonstrance: do not simply list, do not pursue the A through Z of your activities path! Regardless of the personal statement prompt, tell the story from your vantage. Connect the dots.
“The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily–perhaps not possibly–chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow: it is the continuous thread of revelation.”
― Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings
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