自述五节课--001

Education has really one basic factor,
a sine qua non—one must want it.
—George Edward Woodberry

To begin to discuss the realities of graduate study and the related issue of writing personal statements, I put to you three cases:

Case 1: A student applies to graduate school simply because he’s not sure what else to do with his life. As he naively writes in his personal statement when defining his long-term goals: “I’m open to limitless possibilities!”

Case 2: A student plagiarizes material in a graduate application essay, reasoning that the same rules of citation that applied in college papers are not relevant, and that no one would bother checking her source anyway.

Case 3: A 4.0 student competes for and wins a national scholarship, attends graduate school for one semester, then drops out. He relishes the spirit of competition in winning the scholarship, but finds graduate school to be more unfriendly and less fulfilling than he expects.

As a writing tutor who has worked with thousands of students on their graduate applications, I have witnessed variations of all three of these cases. Saddest and worst of all, at least to my lights, is the disappointment posed by Case 3. Students who accept national scholarships are literally taking someone else’s seat from them, and the idea that they would then drop a scholarship that could have gone to someone else could be viewed as unconscionable.

Unifying all these cases is one guiding principle and a key reason why graduate schools and scholarship committees ask students for personal essays in the first place: self-definition. What you’re really asked to do in writing a personal essay is to define yourself: your motivations, your conscience, your aptitude, your history, your commitment, your confidence, your responsibility, your decision-making—in other words, your personal ethic. Any discussion of writing in relation to personal statements begins best with a consideration of guided self-reflection, self-motivation, and ethics. Grounded in these principles, this chapter will help you to consider whether or not graduate study is right for you.

Self-Reflection and Graduate School

Before even beginning the application process, you must consider your reasoning for attending graduate school. Here are some commonly cited reasons, good and bad:

Grad school is a great way to put off having to deal with the real world.
The job market is bad right now, but by the time I finish my degree it will be better.
Others have been telling me I should go to grad school because I had good grades as an undergrad.
My parents went to grad school, so I should too.
If I don’t go to grad school, I’ll have to move back home.
A graduate degree will guarantee me more money in a future job.
I have no job offers, but a decent GPA.
I enjoy teaching and research, and grad school is an opportunity to do both.
Grad school is a great way to start over with my emotional life, especially since I just got dumped.
Having a PhD would give me greater status and more self-worth.
My work experience so far has been uninspiring, and I want to explore new opportunities that would come with a higher degree.
I’ve applied for and received a scholarship, so I owe it to others to accept and use it.
It’s a sanctioned and convenient way to defer my student loans.
Quite simply, I love learning.

It’s easier to pass judgment on some of these reasons than others, but all are used regularly, and the most important realization about them is this: Even the worst of reasons doesn’t guarantee failure in grad school, just as even the best of reasons doesn’t guarantee success. Those who succeed in graduate school tend to have a dogged work ethic matched to an ambitious vision and a strong sense of obligation to self, while those who do not succeed tend to spend much of their emotional time questioning their own sense of value and purpose in the process. Because of the personal and professional challenges that come hand in hand with graduate education, all grad students experience concentrated periods of self-assessment, and responsible students begin that assessment even before they apply.

The Culture of Graduate Study

Every graduate department probably has one—someone you hear about and maybe even witness in your first year of study. Someone who lives on coffee and cigarettes and socializes vigorously, perhaps even earning a storied nickname such as “the Professor” or “Rasputin.” Or someone who is reclusive and rarely seen, spiriting around the hallways or labs mostly at night, writing secret little notes that are crumbled and quickly stuffed into trouser pockets as you walk by. What these someones have in common is that they are graduate students (perhaps only allegedly) who are endlessly working on their dissertations.

There’s an old joke about a student being admonished by his professor: “No, I’m afraid students can’t get tenure.” Some grad students hang around long enough that they don’t seem to get that joke. They receive several extensions on their dissertations, perhaps even get part-time university-supported work teaching or doing lab research, and yet they never seem to finish what they claim is a legitimate and active dissertation, and instead become the stuff of puzzled ridicule and whispered legend.

How can such a thing happen? Quite simple: In graduate school, you are responsible for your own education. Hence, you can manage it well or you can squander it. Although graduate programs certainly do push their students along and support them, they also include a great number of hurdles than can be difficult to clear. Some sobering realities about graduate education follow:

It typically takes 2-3 years to complete a master’s degree and 5-6 to complete a PhD, and for some students it takes longer.
During your graduate study, your sources of funding from the school may change from year to year and sometimes might even be in jeopardy.
By comparison to undergraduate study, there is far less attention to grades and far more emphasis on a long-term, meaningful, publishable project. Despite less emphasis on grades, some grad students do fail their comprehensive exams and are ejected from their programs.
Your relationship with your advisor is one of the most important in your life, with all the paradoxical trappings that can come with complex relationships: mentorship, competition, collegiality, distrust, empathy, partnership, unfairness, kindness, acquiescence, and even break-up.
Your teaching assistantship may throw you to the lions and expect you to teach your own class with virtually no supervision, or you may spend much of your assistantship fighting with the Xerox machine and processing grades from a class of hundreds of students.
Often, your advisor is struggling to get tenure just as you are struggling to probe relevant literature or gather data. The two struggles don’t necessarily coalesce, and yours is readily viewed as the less meaningful one.
If you’re attending grad school on a university or national scholarship, you may be looked at with some suspicion by your peers and the faculty, or you may be held in higher regard than others, with elevated expectations.
When you reach the dissertation stage, you may spend a year or two gathering data about a bad hypothesis, or you may write a chapter or two and be told by your committee that you must throw them out.
Your living circumstances may be very different from what you experienced as an undergraduate, involving a sprawling city or a lonely little Podunk built around the university.
Your peers in graduate school may range in age from 21 to 50+, with diverse experiences that include marriages, divorces, children, multiple degrees, work in industry, publications, international travel, or a series of failures or successes beyond any that you’ve ever experienced. These peers become your social world and often your only support network.

Certainly, the picture is not always as grim as this, and many students relish their time in graduate school—in fact, some call it the best time of their lives, especially those who attend graduate school after some unsatisfying time away from education. However, there is also plenty of evidence to back up the argument that things go poorly for many. One 2004 article from The Chronicle of Higher Education suggests that 40-50 percent of students who enter PhD programs do not finish.

To explain these numbers, despite the absence of national studies on the problem, research from institution-specific studies still reveals some noteworthy trends:

Women drop out at a higher rate than men.
Minority students leave at a higher rate than white students do.
Americans drop out more often than international students.
Students leave humanities and social-science programs at a higher rate than those in the sciences.

Considering these disappointing trends, one would think that graduate scholarship winners don’t fall into these patterns. But, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education article cited above, even scholars who are awarded graduate research fellowships from the National Science Foundation finish their PhD programs at about a rate of 75 percent, which is only slightly higher than for other science students in doctoral programs.

The purpose behind presenting these realities, of course, is both to help inform your decision-making process and to help you consider, if after serious self-reflection you decide graduate education is for you, the most effective way to compose your personal statements and other application materials. Being more informed about the culture of graduate study will both help you be more prepared and help you to be taken more seriously as you apply.

Student Writing and Ethics

Imagine having to type and sign your name under this (redundant) sentence at the end of your personal statement:

I certify that this essay is original work prepared by me, the author.

Well, you need not imagine it—many scholarship and grad school applications include just such a statement for you to sign. Though it may seem almost absurd, by definition, that a student’s personal statement would need to be endorsed as being personal and original, growing concerns about academic integrity have made such a testimony necessary in the eyes of many.

The evidence that many students cheat in college is overwhelming. There are popular “self-help” handbooks published on the subject, and a growing number of classes in high school and college where teachers ban cell phones so that students can’t text message test answers to each other (there are other good reasons to ban cells in classes, too). As cited in the article "Educators blame Internet for rise in student cheating" in The Seattle Times, one survey of 70,000 students conducted by the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University found that 95 percent of high school and college students “admit to some form of academic cheating”. Other surveys report far less shocking but equally troubling results, usually settling on figures of about 50 percent of students who note that they have participated at least once in academic cheating.

Given the temptation and habit built into a culture where many students do cheat, and given the high stakes involved when applying for a scholarship or to grad school, it is not unreasonable to think that some students practice some form of cheating even in their personal statements. In this context, unethical practices range from exaggeration to poor source citation to outright plagiarism.

Lies, Exaggerations, and “Creative Truths”

One of the most famous cases of lies in a personal essay, which eventually led to a lawsuit by the writer of the essay, was in the news in 1998 (see the article "Judge Vindicates Princeton/School Blew Whistle on Lying Student"). Princeton University alerted the medical schools one of its graduates had applied to that he had made false claims in his personal statement. The graduate and would-be doctor then sued Princeton, but the judge threw out the case after testimony was over and before the case had gone to jury. During the course of the trial, the graduate admitted to telling several lies and “creative truths” in his application. In his personal statement, he misidentified his race, lied about winning a prestigious scholarship, and falsely claimed that “a family of lepers had donated half their beggings” to support his dream. (This last claim is particularly creative, in that it is highly difficult and unsavory to check up on its veracity.) In the article cited above, Dean Nancy Malkiel at Princeton testified that the school had an obligation to inform the student’s target medical programs: “It’s up to us to see to it that the people entering the medical profession are competent, confident and trustworthy.”

And then there are “optimistic exaggerations” with just a whiff of truth. I once worked with a student on his personal essay, pausing with interest over a comment that he had “started a foundation” to help the unfortunate in a particular third world country meet their technological needs. (Impressive, certainly, but also so exact and unusual that I questioned him about it.) Because this student was applying for a prestigious national scholarship, where humanitarian service is especially valued, I knew this essay detail would capture the attention of the selection committee if the student reached the interview stage. Well, it turns out that he had indeed spent a semester in the third world country he had cited—again, impressive—but the “foundation” he spoke of was really just him kindly sending a rebuilt computer to his former supervisor in that country upon his return to the States. He had plans to send more hardware and start an organized effort, but in fact it was much more of a noble dream than a reality.

My example isn’t meant to belittle the student—in fact, his application otherwise was impressive and he quickly retracted his original statement after some discussion—but to represent how tempting it can be to exaggerate with the hope of impressing, and to note just how harmful a trumped up claim can be to one’s credibility. I’ve seen creative exaggeration on resumes submitted as part of an application as well: “I served as an institutional sanitation engineer” really translated to “I was a school janitor”; “I was President of the Nancy Club” really meant “I traded old Nancy and Sluggo comics with some of my friends on facebook.” I genuinely believe that students who write like this don’t necessarily mean to lie; they just aren’t sure if the truth sounds impressive enough. And in the case of the “Nancy Club” —well, there’s simply no way to dress it up, and it just doesn’t belong.

Clearly, students making exaggerated claims and telling “creative truths” in their personal essays only hurt their ethos and raise their audience’s doubts. Usually these kinds of claims are highly transparent as well, and the only person who is in a position to defend or explain them is the writer. Seasoned readers easily sniff out the exaggeration or, worse, may even ask the student about the claim in an interview, only to receive a fumbling response or a downright, regrettable lie.

To state the obvious, then, tell the truth about yourself. A good rule of thumb is to assume that anything you write in a personal essay or on an application resume could come back to haunt you in a follow-up interview. Be prepared to back up any claim you make with verbal evidence, even beyond that provided in your essay, and don’t put yourself in a position of having to retract something just because you hoped to make it look more impressive than it actually was.

Plagiarism

As a writing tutor who helps students wrestle with issues of source citation on a daily basis, I know that well-meaning students are sometimes genuinely puzzled about ethical source citation practices. The nuances of this issue are many, especially when one cites internet sources; however, the underlying ethic should be clear—when you use someone else’s original ideas or words directly, you must cite your source. Unfortunately, so many students are habitually guilty of “sloppy thinking” in this area that professors have to give the issue special attention, even though they’d much rather not. I once had a student copy an entire page from another student’s paper during a rough draft session without her knowledge, then hand the paper in as his own. When I compared the two papers and pointed out that he had actually plagiarized much of the material, he tried to claim that he had simply failed to cite the other student’s paper. I’ve also had students innocently claim that if material appears on the web it need not be cited because, by definition, it’s common knowledge. Such appalling reasoning induces premature aging and weary hearts in teachers.

In regards to citation practices within personal essays, the first principle you must understand is that citation within a personal essay is indeed a common practice. You need not worry that it will look odd to cite sources within your essay, especially when you apply for, say, a Goldwater Scholarship or a National Science Foundation Fellowship. In these instances, parts of the application are akin to a scientific literature review, so failure to cite your sources professionally could actually be a kiss of death.

The second principle is that the same rules for citation are relevant as applied in your college papers—i.e., you must cite sources in the following circumstances:

When you use statistics or data generated by other authors;
When your quote verbatim or paraphrase in a way that your wording closely resembles the original source;
When you borrow another author’s interpretation, argument, theory, or hypothesis;
When you wish to enhance your credibility or argument by comparing it to the published work of another.

In such circumstances, always cite your source, following the maxim that it is better to be safe than sorry. Further standards and mechanics to follow when citing sources in personal essays are detailed in the "Citing Sources" section of Chapter 2 of this handbook. For much more extensive advice on source use, you can refer to Chapter 5 of Style for Students Online.

Avoiding Plagiarism and Using Samples in This Handbook Responsibly

If you’re not convinced that plagiarism is practiced by students applying to graduate school, just visit one of the many websites where papers and personal statements are sold to students, such as 123helpme.com. At schoolsucks.com, one of the oldest websites devoted to this mission, a search for the keywords “personal statement” turns up hits including personal essays written for students seeking graduate study in nursing, philosophy, education, and criminal justice. For about $30-40 a pop, foolish (and apparently wealthy) students can purchase one of these personal statements and potentially plagiarize from it, fundamentally cheating both themselves and their readers. Success in such a venture is, of course, perhaps unlikely and certainly unethical, and the idea that material from someone else’s personal essay can simply be transplanted into your own reflects badly on the quality of the original and even more badly on your own self-image.

At the same time, I do offer many sample personal statements in this handbook for your considered study, and that is exactly how you should use them—for study. Chapter 4 offers both examples and brief reviews of those examples, while Chapter 5 includes both essays that won national scholarships and those that did not win but are nevertheless effective. These essays were written by students from across the country and abroad, and I adapted them for print with the permission of the essay writers, aiming for a diversity of samples and voices. When studying these examples responsibly, you’ll realize that strong personal essays are so good that they, quite simply, cannot be copied; they succeed by persuading as argument, by achieving individuality, and—most importantly—by being personal.

Seeking Help as you Apply for Graduate Study and Scholarships

Obviously, as you apply for graduate school and scholarships you are not alone in the process, with your primary help coming from your mentors, references, and designated academic and scholarships advisors at your school. However, in working with these individuals, you must understand the realities and ethical responsibilities that they uphold in the process of helping you.

Mentors and References

First of all, please understand that your references and mentors feel an obligation not only to you but to the program or scholarship to which you are applying. Many in academia feel that they should be guardians of their discipline, upholding high standards for those who work within it. Even supportive mentors sometimes say no to students seeking a letter of reference, in that they may feel they are too busy to write a letter, may not be fully supportive of you in relation to what you’re applying for, or may not have been approached by you in a way that makes them comfortable writing a fully positive letter. More often, though, you will not be turned down by anyone you ask to write a letter of recommendation, but your references will probably have these ethical expectations of you:

That you give ample time for the letter to be written before the deadline—typically 3-4 weeks if possible. Often, those most willing to write letters are also simultaneously writing them for others, under similar deadline constraints.
That you clearly understand and communicate the application protocol regarding the letter of recommendation. Some programs ask references to mail the letter directly to them, some ask references to give the letter back to the applicant in a sealed envelope, and some don’t specify any protocol and it is up to the student to sort it out.
That you waive your rights to see the contents of the letter, thus allowing it to be confidential. Selection committees typically expect you to give up your access rights by signing a waiver on the application form. Some references might nevertheless share the letter with you if they trust your maturity, but the choice is theirs to make.
That you understand that the recommendation—especially if it is written to support your application for a national scholarship—might include some criticism as well as praise. Increasingly, selection committees are calling for honest and full assessment of a candidate’s strengths and weaknesses both.
That you follow up with the recommender by keeping him or her informed of the progress of your application. Few students actually do this, which can frustrate professors who have worked hard to be supportive.

Along with these expectations, which often make both you and your references equally uncomfortable, you may need to partner with your references in the reference letter and application process. Some professors will readily review and critique your personal statement and application materials, and in many cases, such as in the sciences where you are working on a team research project, you may require the help of a professor or graduate student to faithfully represent a full project description. Some professors ask to review your resume or a past essay you wrote to help them write a recommendation letter, and some will even ask you directly what kind of detail you would like to have included in the letter, suggesting that you write some of the text down for them in an e-mail. After that, it’s up to the reference to reshape that material effectively in a letter.

Academic Advisors, Career Counselors, and Scholarships Directors

When you apply for a national scholarship, in particular a scholarship where the institution internally assesses and nominates its top candidates, your school will usually have a designated academic advisor, career counselor, or scholarships director to help you through the process. Understand that this person’s role is to coax forth the best from you rather than write your application materials for you, and that schools are limited as to how many students they can put forth for each nominated scholarship. The role of the scholarships director is to be both cheerleader and judge—a precarious tightrope indeed. Even if the director from your school personally “recruits” you for the scholarship because of your academic record, the director must ultimately view you in context of all the other potential scholarship candidates, both at your school and nationally, and must also be concerned with the reputation of the school you are representing. Just as one example, for the graduate scholarship awarded by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, each accredited college and university in the US may nominate up to two students only, and in 2009 the Foundation expected to award just 30 scholarships from a pool of over 1,000 applications. In making choices about which students to nominate for a national scholarship, your school’s designated advisor must serve as a motivator and writing coach to you, while keeping in mind the odds against success, and maybe even deciding against putting you forth as a candidate in favor of one of your peers.

In short, you must understand the ethical and practical concerns of anyone helping you prepare your application, recognizing that the above concerns are typical rather than invented, and that your responsibility is to prepare an application of maximum efficacy, respecting and partnering with those who choose to help you.