Authenticity is the finest approach to the personal essay. The success of several early decision applications – from U Chicago to Cambridge – clarify this simple fact. I offer a small, instructive sampling of personal statement reflections. Each is so intrinsic to the individual writer that the reader leaves the page with a momentary sense of intimacy.
Take for example, the girl with strabismus, an esoteric medical term for a common disorder: cross-eyed. By the age of nine, she’d undergone six or seven surgeries only to emerge with extropia, and her left eye gradually wandered out. She did not notice the slow change until classmates began shunning her. Over the course of her fourth grade, she worked mightily to draw her left eye inward. She had headaches; her vision periodically blurred and still she exercised her eye. By the end of the year, her gaze was even and direct. A new, internal perspective had likewise formed. The girl had come to see potential on the other side of endurance, on the opposite side of pain. She had become a master of seeing beyond limits.
Or, consider the budding chemist. He chose to discuss the problematic process of producing a perfect meringue. He had controlled for all the variables in his culinary powers: the amount of sugar, the temperature of the eggs, the duration of the cooking, the heat of the oven. The only variable beyond his control was the hen herself. Only she could determine the water content of each egg! How to proceed with the uncontrollable? The student plunged into a description of egg albumin and denaturation, the unraveling of proteins from a coiled, natural state, that lends eggs their unique culinary flexibility. He not only exhibited refined knowledge of protein structure; he entertained, and all while embracing the uncontrollable as essential to the practice of any art or, for that matter, scientific innovation.
One writer climbed the mountains in central China to watch the Perseid meteor shower. It was August and still cold in the evenings. He and his friends took turns standing sentry, heads tilted one by one toward the skies. They promised to wake each other for the lights. The stars never came; the clouds socked in. The fire reduced to embers and cinder. Sitting still in the night, the boy stargazed with eyes shut. He would return the following year, a vivid picture in his mind’s eye would suffice until that time. And in the morning, they hiked back down the mountain.
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