True story: my student wrote his personal statement in one night (and got into Cornell)

Story time.

One evening in late October, only a few days before the November 1 deadline, a student named Ed contacted me looking for help with his personal statement essay. He seemed, to be honest, completely distraught. He didn't like his essay and he didn't know what to do. And he wanted to get this whole miserable essay writing process over with and finish the thing that night. It sounded a little crazy to me but I love a challenge. "Let's do it," I said.

Ed sent me his personal statement draft. It was an essay about playing the piano. Here's what I read:

I carefully placed the 31 pages inside the blue binder I had prepared, and set it up on the music stand. The opening chords of Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto are notoriously difficult as they require large hands to play, but I didn’t let that bother me. Even though I had tiny hands at nine years old, I read straight through the chords and into the large arpeggios, imagining an orchestra accompanying me. It took me a while to realize that the trumpet playing out of tune in the background was actually my mom begging me to stop. My confidence was never warped though. I kept banging away, indifferent to the noise I was producing. 

When I was younger, I was obsessed with the challenge that came with learning a new piece. Every time my piano teacher would assign me a new piece after a concert, I made sure that it was hard enough. I refused to play the easier pieces because I knew I was capable of more. Although I learned most of my pieces with my teacher, I always secretly kept the binder with all four Rachmaninoff piano concertos, the hardest piano concertos ever composed, waiting for me. I knew I couldn't play most parts correctly, yet I would keep attempting the assortments of sharps and flats, and the majestic apexes, hearing the orchestra behind me. 

Whenever I learned a new piece, my teacher would also always stress how important it was for me to play a piece in the way it was composed. I learned to play every note on the page as it was written, with no room for interpretation. And that’s exactly why I resented my lessons. My teacher didn’t want me to be playing the piano, he wanted the composer to be playing. He didn’t give me room to express myself. As I matured as a pianist, I learned to realize that my teacher’s restriction of my musicality was precisely the reason I never enjoyed playing his selected pieces. I would convince myself that his pieces weren’t hard enough, where in reality, they just didn’t let me play how I wanted to. I figured out that the Rachmaninoff concertos I would practice instead of my assigned pieces were really just my means of expressing my suppressed creativity. Although playing the concertos sounded atrocious, they let me connect with the creative part of myself, making me love them to death. I would have never continued piano if it hadn’t been for scrappily playing Rachmaninoff.

Through my realization in piano, I’ve learned to appreciate the “creative outlets” I make for myself, and to never judge any before really experiencing them. For example, for years, my dad would encourage me to explore programming, but it never seemed to resonate with me. Out of curiosity, I recently decided to give it another shot and I surprisingly became fascinated with it. I found unrestricted freedom in the world I engineered. I could assign my own unique methods and properties to objects in my realm. Just like my unexpected interest in programming, I also surprisingly found another outlet for my creativity in the field of oncology during my sophomore year of high school. I never thought that I would like anything to do with cellular biology; however, I gradually learned to admire the intricacy and irregularities of the tumor microenvironment. 

Piano has ultimately taught me to appreciate innovation. I have learned to become curious towards trying new things. I have also learned to unconditionally follow my passions, and to never doubt myself. Everyday that I come home from school now, I open the blue binder to practice. This upcoming spring, my school’s symphony orchestra will accompany me in Rachmaninoff’s 2nd piano concerto. If I could travel back in time to my 9-year-old self, I would surely tell him to keep banging away at the keys, and to never stop.

My first impression of the essay was that the writing was solid and there were some nice moments of personality, but on the whole the essay was a little all over the place.

The essay also tried to connect Ed's passion for piano with his future studies in programming and medicine. My students often try to make these kinds of connections: "[insert extracurricular] taught me [insert future major]." However, these connections often feel forced, usually because they are forced. If I ask my students whether the extracurricular really did inspire their major, they will tell me something like, "No, but I thought it would sound good in the essay." It is also wasting space to talk about your major in the personal statement if you will need to write a "Why Major" type of supplemental, and this was the case for Ed since he was applying to Cornell which had a 650-word "Why Us"/"Why Major" essay.

And then there was the problem of the topic: piano. It can be very difficult to write about topics like piano in a unique way, simply because there are so many applicants who can write about this topic. The same goes for pretty much any instrument, sport, or extracurricular. I tell my students to pretty much assume that thousands of other students will be writing their essays on the same topic. However, rather than ditch the topic completely, I ask my students this question: "How could you write an essay about piano in a way that only you could?"

I also ask my students to imagine 100 essays on the same topic, in this case, piano, lined up on a wall. Would their family and friends be able to identify which essay is theirs? If not, then that's a problem. To address this, I take my students through a brainstorming exercise I call "The Dewdrop Method."

Essentially, rather than the topic of Ed's essay being about piano, I wanted him to center the essay on a "dewdrop," which is a smaller, more specific and concrete lens that would allow him to discuss piano without that topic getting too big. A dewdrop can be a person, place, thing, or story.

As we moved through these potential dewdrops, Ed started to talk enthusiastically about Rachmaninoff, the composer he mentions a few times in his rough draft. He even had a nick name for this composer: "Rach." He began to tell me stories about listening to Rach in his basement, and how, as a kid, he had measured his hands to see if they were as big as Rach's.

This was a good sign. More than any other factor, the biggest thing I look for in helping students choose between a topic is simply their own interest in it. If it's something they clearly enjoy talking about, and have a lot to say about, then that energy will come across in an essay. Even if there is a topic that is better strategically to write about, I will tell my student to write about the one that they are genuinely more interested in. As Harold Bauld, a former admissions officer at Brown wrote, “There are no good or bad topics for college essays, only good or bad essays."

Ed and I finished our brainstorming session and I needed to get to another meeting with a student, but Ed and I weren't done. We planned to meet again in an hour, and I gave Ed very specific instructions on what to work on during that time. I told him to set a timer for an hour and write down everything he wanted to say about Rach, and I told him, I mean everything.

I tell my students that, in order for free writes to work, you cannot censor yourself. It's like opening a faucet all the way: yes, some bad things will come out but the bad things need to come out in order for the really good things to come out. That means that you should write embarrassing things, make bad jokes, and write how you would talk to your friends. Because you can always delete the bad stuff when you edit. My students are often really afraid to just let themselves go in this way, but I told Ed he kind of didn't have a choice. He didn't have a lot of time, so he would have to just trust me with this whole free writing thing.

One hour later...

Ed showed me his free write. And it was good! Really, really good! Sure, it was a mess but it was a beautiful mess. It was probably about 1,000 words long if not longer. Reading through his paragraphs, his love of Rach was infectious and what had been a somewhat generic essay about piano was now full of identifying details, from his intimidating teacher named Vladimir to that anecdote he had told me about measuring his hands. The voice of the writing also felt very "him" with phrases like “wannabe prodigy” and "absolute trash."

The next step was to edit this block of marble into a sculpture. Since I was going to be busy with other students for the next couple of hours, I told Ed to try to cut down the word limit and polish up the writing a bit without diminishing the voice he had built.

A couple of hours later...

Ed and I hopped on the call, and I was excited to read this new draft. But as I started reading, I saw that Ed had polished the essay too much. The little phrases that had made it so distinct (“wannabe prodigy”) had been scrubbed and replaced with more sanitized, and less interesting versions.

This happens a lot when my students start to edit their free writes. While, yes, it's good to punch up the writing a bit, it's important to keep in phrases that are more informal and conversational. This wasn't too much of a problem with Ed, because we just started replacing certain parts of his new draft with some parts of his free write and it became a good hybrid of the two. And then, around 11pm, we finished. We had really done it. Ed had completely re-written his essay in one night.

Here's his final draft:

I was eight years old when I first heard Rachmaninoff. His second piano concerto, which I’ve come to refer to simply as the Rach 2, played from my dad’s stereo in the basement. Something about the thick layers of sound I heard that day, as if each instrument played a different song, affected me differently than any Mozart or Beethoven sonata ever had. I remember my dad explaining to me how Rachmaninoff’s music was notoriously difficult as it requires large hands to play, and how I quickly Googled his hand size, grabbing a ruler to compare Rach’s hands to my own tiny ones.

My early attempts at playing Rachmaninoff embarrass me now. I remember really wanting to play the first movement of the Rach 2 and miserably failing to get past the first page. In the beginning, I was really just trying to impress everyone, imagining people thinking that I was really cool as my hands ran up and down the keyboard, but all my middle school friends were into was football, rap, and Grand Theft Auto, and they honestly couldn't care less. My piano teacher, Olga, thought I was great, though. This marked the delusional period of my piano career where I quite literally thought that I was Rach and that I could play any piece ever composed. Olga wouldn’t care at all about my mistakes, and just let me have fun with challenging repertoire before I really deserved it. 

Then, Olga retired. That’s when I got stuck with my worst nightmare: Vladimir. He was extremely strict, and his strong accent made everything even more scary. During his theory class, he actually made me and almost everyone else in the class cry even though we were all in our annoying, “I’m really cool” middle school phase. Vladimir thought I was absolute trash and didn’t ever hesitate to tell me. He forced me to go back to the basics and assigned me the pieces I thought I was too good for. I played Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart instead of Liszt, Chopin, and Rachmaninoff. I started to actually play pieces in the right way and wasn’t just a crazy 12-year-old “wannabe prodigy” who thought he had mastered the instrument. Eventually, I actually started to learn the Rach 2. I performed the first movement with Vladimir and was genuinely proud of myself. 

The more I fall in love with Rachmaninoff’s music, the more I find within it. The style of Rachmaninoff’s compositions changed as he grew older: his younger self composed more fast, technical and loud compositions, whereas the pieces he composed in his later years, were darker and deeper. An aspect of Rachmaninoff’s music that has never changed though, is the way his melodies are layered or “palyphone” as Vladimir says it, meaning that they have several voices. Every voice in his melodies portrays a unique sound: the faster voices are there to create an aura of movement, while the longer, sustained voices showcase a simple yet beautiful depth.

Although I would like to believe that I’ve matured with Rachmaninoff’s music, sometimes all I can do is let the braggadocious 8-year-old-me take over and bang away for a bit. Specifically in the build up to the apex in his second piano concerto, I find intense satisfaction from smashing the keys in and creating a powerful ring when I play. After all, playing loud and fast can be pretty fun sometimes. In the next moment, I’m also able to tap into the deeper side of the composition. I can feel like an old, experienced man who’s seen everything. Rach is someone I’m not done with yet, and someone who I’ll never get tired of. His layers are always there, my whole self, a whole lifetime in music waiting to be played.

This is still one of my favorite essays one of my students has written. And it proves that writing your personal statement doesn't have to be a multi-month, arduous process. In fact, sometimes the more you edit and polish an essay to perfection, the more you erase the fresh, conversational tone that is present throughout Ed's personal statement.

And this story has a happy ending. Ed now attends Cornell University, where he studies biomedical engineering. He is absolutely thriving there and told me he's grateful to be a student there every day.