One of the things that graduate applicants don’t understand about the application process is that it is a very human process on the selection end.
The people who read your application are approximately 5 faculty members who have been tasked with the duty of wading through some 200-1000 applications for admission to their graduate program, and deciding on the final 10-20 applicants who will be admitted. It is an excruciating and exhausting job.
Understand that these faculty members are not paid extra for this effort. They come to it after a full day of teaching, grading, preparing lesson plans for the next day’s lecture, enduring a painfully boring faculty meeting, dealing with a distraught student, arguing with colleagues over the curriculum, picking their kids up from daycare, getting them to soccer practice, coming home and starting dinner, eating dinner, cleaning up from dinner, sniping with their spouse over who cleans up from dinner… and then, and only then, sitting down to read through a massive stack of applications (a physical stack in the old days; now a list of computer files).
The fact is, the easiest and most pleasant task of the faculty member is to find a file to reject. Because fast rejection instantly reduces the pile. The time consuming part is in the last cut, the cut from 20 to 10 or so. But the cut of 100 to 20, or 500 to 50—well, that happens fast. Because it needs to. Because nobody has time for it to be slow.
Any problems with your application in terms of missing materials, unclear information, or a personal essay that is meandering and vague, means instant reject. Nobody is going to hunt through your essay for the nugget of genius on page 3. If they aren’t sold in the first two paras, that tell them precisely who you are, what your grad school goal is, and why you’re qualified to do it (and why you should do it there, at their program), then they aren’t sold at all.
Stories, memories, random philosophical reflections….these lead to rejection. Clarity, conciseness, a laser-like focus on goals and qualifications—those make the cut.
The good news is: follow the format for the Admissions essay that is given here, in this post, and you’ll have an essay that does everything it should, quickly, on the first page.
