Distinctive

By Adam Muri-Rosenthal, Ph.D.

“I hit the word limit so I stopped writing.”

Every year, throughout the essay drafting odyssey, multiple students dismay me with this very phrase. It’s an idea that arises from the misconception that a word limit is a cumbersome goal to be reached and, once reached, an impassable wall beyond which (as Gandalf once said to the Balrog), “you shall not pass.” That’s understandable. High school essay word limits are often like that: a tiresome chore measured more in terms of length than of quality. (“Do my teachers even read this?” you might be asking. Back in high school, I had friends that would, halfway through an essay, include the words, “Are you really reading this?” and have the essay returned “graded” with their query unanswered and unnoticed.) And it’s true that some teachers may be satisfied simply to see 2-3 pages filled with text without any regard for the quality of their content. Is it any wonder that more and more students are turning to AI to write their essays for them? And is that any different from random scribblings of dubious quality? It’s a bit of a sad commentary on the state of education. But I digress.

Now before you get the wrong idea, I am not that teacher, and if you are working with one of my colleagues, neither are they. No. We are that mentor that believes in you, knows what you’re capable of, and intends to demand more from you than anyone ever has. Will you hate us a little bit for it? I’m not going to lie: probably. College essays demand nothing less. Remember: your work will be compared to that of thousands of others. What will take you months to write and perfect will take an admissions officer about one minute to evaluate. So it doesn’t have to be good. No. It has to jump off the page, grab them by the lapels, and ice blast them harder than that guy in the Mentos Pure Fresh commercial.

So you need a new mindset, and if it’s the summer before senior year, you need it—speaking of vintage commercials—faster than gettupa (if you don’t know what I mean, following this link is so worth it). Writing these essays can certainly feel like a chore—especially with someone like me hounding you (haha don’t hate me). The truth is, though, that writing a college essay is not—cannot be—a rote task. It is (and must be!) a work of art.

And in order to create a work of art—especially one that manages to grip and astonish—you need to start with raw material. Here is where we return to that odious opening phrase and boldly attempt to banish it from your mental phrasebook.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are an artist: a sculptor. You’re trying to create a sculpture out of a block of marble. Yes, I realize that most of you have never done this. Neither have I, for that matter. That being said, I have enough respect for your powers of imagination to believe that you can form a reasonably accurate mental image of this situation. Now, imagine that as you chip away at your block of marble, you encounter holes and impurities, and as your chisel digs deeper, one piece of the block crumbles to dust. Another falls off—oops! That was going to be the arm of your David, Michelangelo, but hey, who cares. He didn’t need to hold that sling anyway!

Yeah, you get the picture. Er… the sculpture. Right?

My point is, it’s useless to start sculpting when your raw materials are subpar. The same is true of the personal statement.

Eventually, you will be sculpting, but first, you need quality raw materials. The hardest part of writing the personal statement (and any work of creative writing, for that matter) is generating great ideas and wresting them into submission until they lie, imperfect perhaps, but defeated, on the written page. As with sculpting, you need quality raw materials to work with. In its early stages, and even in some of the later ones, the act of writing is far more akin to mining the marble from the hillside than it is to forging the sculpture.

The hillside, in this metaphor, is your mind: with all its ideas, memories, hauntingly awkward moments like that time you talked about how Jake’s ugly nose looks like an angry radish without realizing Jake was standing right behind you. (The embarrassment is so painfully acute that you still have to cross the road to avoid him whenever you cross paths.) It’s all there, but the hillside won’t give it up easily. You need to dig—to put your shoulders into that mental pickaxe with greater vigor and intentionality than perhaps you’ve ever mustered for this always-worthwhile-but-often-uncomfortable act of very necessary introspection. There are lots of factors making this a cumbersome process. Distractions (like the text message from Amira inviting you to go to the mall or the smell of bacon from the kitchen) are just the beginning. Hunger (that bacon—or a delicious vegan alternative, if that’s how you roll—sounds pretty good right now). Writer’s block (of marble). And sometimes—often—it’s simply the pain of remembering the uncomfortable. Yet it’s your vulnerabilities that provide the highest-grade marble, the most resistant to the pickaxe, because in most cases, we simply don’t want to talk about that moment of discomfort with Jake that no number of mental replays can rectify and that probably evokes something akin to physical torment.

Yeah, I know. I have those moments too (we all do). And while you can be certain that I’ll be the strictest of taskmasters, you can also rest assured that I will never—no never—judge you for the vulnerabilities you share. Not only because I care about you and the relationship we are developing, but also because they are indubitably the source of the best raw materials the hillside can provide.

So, thanks for telling me about Jake. I know you’ve never told anyone else, but we are off to a good start. “START?!” Well, yes. Jake is only the beginning. Twenty pounds of marble isn’t even enough to sculpt you a good hand to slap yourself with. We need a good solid metric ton (or even an Imperial ton; I’m not picky, at least not about this) in order to evoke a good picture of who you are. I also need to know about the time you LITERALLY DIED because you vomited on the shoes of your junior prom date’s dad and your date didn’t speak to you for the entire night. And the time you passed gas while delivering a presentation to your AP US History class on the Chicago Haymarket Affair even though you swore it was Kimeli shifting her weight on the old pleather couch.

Now, here is where things sometimes get tricky, because the best, heaviest marble often comes not from these painful moments from our recent past (it always feels recent, even when it isn’t, doesn’t it?) but how we deal with them. So yes, as if it were not painful enough regurgitating these painful memories like a momma bird feeding her starving hatchlings (that’s me, I’m the hatchlings in this metaphor, and I am exactly that hungry for your anguish, sorry not sorry), I might be telling you that you need to talk to Jake, apologize, tell him how you’ve seen noses that resemble far less attractive vegetables (oh God you didn’t think you could make it even worse, did you) or admit that in fact you were the flatulent punctuator of that Windy City Powerpoint. Yes, that’s right: your ability to confront your failings is marble of the finest stuff—marble worth at least 500 pounds. And believe me, because I actually made a student tell his macho best friend that he regularly dressed up as Disney characters to earn a spare dollar (and I’d do it again too—it took months of persuasion but in the end, it turned out the friend didn’t even care. Let me tell you, though, it MADE that essay and he got into one of the best schools in the country).

Yet we began this journey with the word limit, and that’s where we need to end it. So don’t even think about telling me you can’t write anymore. You must disregard the word limit until we have a block of marble large and solid enough to sculpt your masterpiece from. And make no mistake—I will send you back to the hillside with that pickaxe long enough to make Sisyphus seem like a lazy good-for-nothing (which would be cool sculpture, now that I think of it).

So keep writing. Keep mining. And be strong—keep the good stuff coming, no matter how much it hurts—until it’s time to sculpt.