Distinctive

By Adrian Cho, Ph.D.

“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”

– Marcel Proust (1871-1922), In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way

The cursor blinks on an empty page. You rack your brain as you search your unresponsive mind for details on the moment you threw the game-winning touchdown pass. “What was I hearing? Seeing? Feeling?” Truth is, you were so fueled with adrenaline that it was all a blur. You don’t remember much, and you feel frustrated having to write about something you don’t recall very well. The cursor keeps on blinking.

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One thing I frequently encounter when helping students write their personal statements is the feeling of wanting to be 100% historically accurate in telling their stories. Some students feel this instinct more strongly than others. I understand the impulse, because I feel it too. After all, you shouldn’t lie or be misleading about what happened in your life, right? While it’s definitely true that you don’t want to make up events wholesale for your personal statement, writing a self-narrative offers more freedom than you might think and is a more constructive exercise than excavating and submitting an archaeological record. In this post, I’d like to invite you to think differently about memory, storytelling, and personal narrative.

The science of imperfect recall

An important thing to understand about memory is that it’s not a movie or video tape you can rewind and unwind that allows you to see an “objective record” of the past. That can be an unsettling idea to grapple with. Surely, my memory couldn’t be faulty and incomplete. Even so, the unreliability of memories is one of the most firmly established findings in psychology, with wide-ranging implications for education, interpersonal relationships, and legal proceedings, to name a few. A particularly famous study by Loftus and Palmer vividly illustrated the fallibility of memory simply by changing a single word in a question to the study participants who were asked to recall a video of an automobile accident. Those who were asked, “How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?” were significantly more likely to report broken glass in their recollection than those who were asked, “How fast were the cars going when they hit each other?” (Italicizations are mine, not from the experiment.) Changing that one word didn’t just influence what the participants remembered. It actually altered their memory of the event itself, demonstrating that our recollections are actively reconstructed each time we recall them, not simply retrieved intact.

It’s about meaning, not memory

In writing the personal statement, we most often begin by interrogating significant past events and asking, “What happened?” Articulating that question naturally invites us to try and accurately recall events past and the chronology. For that purpose, the less-than-perfect reliability of memory might seem a hindrance. “Well gee,” you might think, “if I can’t rely on my recollections, how can I write an honest and authentic personal statement?” I see students (and myself) get bogged down trying to trace the details of when and exactly how things happened and spin their wheels attempting to create a perfect replica of their pasts. But that’s a trap. In fact, a photographic reproduction of events is not the purpose of a personal statement, nor is it even necessary. The essay is about interpreting the contents of your memory and assigning meanings, then communicating your self-narrative to the reader.

Psychologist Dan McAdams describes this as ‘narrative identity’ – the evolving story we construct to make sense of our lives. It goes further than the mere question of “What?” and answers the questions “Why?” and “How?” Most of the time, this narrative is constructed unconsciously as we move through life. Writing a personal statement challenges us to consciously unearth that narrative and identify broader themes. The beauty of this exercise is that we simply don’t need a perfect record of the details or timings of events (even if we had access to them) to extract patterns and trace out the arc of our stories. This isn’t about fabricating experiences – the events you write about should be real. But you have much more interpretive freedom than you might think.

Showing and not telling, even when you don’t remember everything

You’ve heard this advice before: “Show, don’t tell.” When weaving in stories from your life, we always encourage students to be as vivid and detailed as possible to bring the scene to life in the readers’ minds. This can be the point where you run into the trap of trying to remember everything correctly and getting stuck. But as I’ve been arguing, you have much more latitude here.

As a fabricated example, let’s say you are writing about a time you were talking with your aunt that sparked your interest in public health. She told you stories about working as a nurse during the 2020 Covid pandemic. Some of the details have faded away, like whether she mentioned specific cases, her routines, or even whether you had this conversation over the phone or in person. But you remember the gist – the sense of urgency, crushing workload, and most importantly, her determination to help people despite her exhaustion. You might then write something like this: “My aunt spoke to me about her exhausting shifts during Covid – how she’d worked double shifts, raced between rooms, and constantly ran out of PPE. And yet, she worked as hard as she could to make sure every patient felt cared for. Hearing about her dedication to public safety and the important role frontline healthcare workers play inspires me to help support those like her.”

In the above example, you might not have remembered if she exactly said she “worked double shifts” or “raced between rooms.” Maybe you remembered one of those details. But as long as you are conveying the right ‘feel’ and the larger point of the moment, you can use your imagination to fill in the details if need be.

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Your personal statement isn’t about excavating perfectly preserved facts from your past. Rather, it’s about constructing meaning and conveying it intelligibly to the reader. I hope that understanding the act of recollection as a reconstructive process liberates you to focus on what really matters – the meaning, the growth, and the story you want to tell, not the perfect details.