The college application personal statement is an odd genre, formulated not as an art or a trade but as an academic and administrative test. It begins with a generously flexible choice of prompts, but the other requirements are as strict and procrustean as a sonnet: it must be no more than 650 words, but not much less either. It must illustrate something important about the author, and who they’ll become — something not already shown in their report cards, portfolios, club memberships, sports trophies, reference letters, or supplemental statements. The intended audience will spend perhaps three minutes reading it, and their opinion will heavily influence where the author lives for the next four years. No pressure.
I don’t think it’s an especially good way to determine who gets to go to which college, but I like the way it requires introspection, self examination, revision, and meditation. Those aren’t things that tend to come naturally to most of us, especially at 17 or 18, and they’re not often required in schoolwork. But even when it’s uncomfortable, it’s healthy and useful to take a hard look at ourselves and our goals, to make them concise and explicit.
That’s my pitch to students, anyway. And I decided that if I was going to say things like that, I’d have to to write one for myself. As I expected, I found it hard going myself. I often advise students to write a draft, then set it aside for a few days and come back to it, and see how it looks with fresh eyes. I had the luxury of writing the first paragraph, setting it aside for months, coming back to it, deleting the entire thing, and starting over. I did that several times. I didn’t have a deadline, after all. But I knew it was going to be useful to write, so I kept coming back to it.
I chose the prompt “Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.” These are my 644 words:
The first time I called myself a writer, I was 21 and trying to impress an undergraduate at Wellesley. It didn’t work, and I didn’t say it again for years. I’d say I worked as a technical writer, but never claimed to be a writer with no qualifying adjective — not when my name went on the cover of a reference book, not when my web copy drove millions of page views, not when I ran direct mail campaigns for a billion-dollar student loan portfolio, not when I self-published my own poetry. Calling myself a writer felt like putting on my grandfather’s suit coat and pretending to be a businessman. I knew it was impostor syndrome, but I didn’t feel I’d earned the title. It felt uncomfortable, and I found myself trying to break it in like the pair of hot pink Dr. Martens I bought with my first paycheck as a freelance editor.
By comparison, I began to describe myself as an activist after a mere decade. That title didn’t begin with a childhood dream and dogged determination, but with coincidence and spite. I’d attended a single community meeting about a daycare center on my street and been perplexed by the sea of opposition. A rival daycare didn’t want to share the local playground; a neighbor worried about traffic; the retailer next door didn’t want to share parking. When I said “a daytime business sounds like a good thing for the neighborhood,” a sea of gray heads turned to me and stared. I hated it. I signed up for newsletters and mailing lists and joined a local political group, and when I moved one city over a few years later, joined a nascent sister group.
Naturally, I took on the role of writer there. I didn’t say “I’m a writer,” but I wrote: web copy, blog posts, explanations like “what is zoning” and “what is affordable housing,” editorials, and, of course, a newsletter. I’d joke that our unincorporated nonprofit was just a mailing list with opinions, but when we crossed a thousand subscribers I had to force myself to stop. In a city of 85,000, that readership made us a major political force, and false modesty would undermine our work, hold us back from exercising the influence we had so carefully built. Even then, I only admitted that I was an activist and nonprofit leader because it hurt the cause to pretend otherwise.
There are precious few times in our lives when we say something and it becomes true simply because we’ve acknowledged it. It’s a kind of magic: we say the words, and in saying them, they take concrete reality. College-bound Americans cast the spell in personal statements, when a student says “I am an aspiring marine biologist” and suddenly is. Job-seekers do it with resumes: I am a chef, a marketer, an HR specialist, a project manager. The magic is there in every 12-step meeting where someone speaks the words “I’m an alcoholic” and reaffirms their place in recovery, and at every wedding where an oath transforms two individuals into a couple. I even found it at my father’s bedside in the last days of his life, writing his obituary with him, looking back at his life and deciding which parts of it were a legacy.
Of course, it takes a long time to prepare that spell, to shape and build an identity, but the declaration makes it feel instant, as though by opening a shell we’re simultaneously creating the egg that pours out. I worked for years before I felt confident enough to say it, and then when I said it, the truth felt sudden, an instant becoming. Simply putting it in words made it real, as though I hadn’t been preparing for it my whole life: Aaron S. Weber is a writer, editor, and activist living in Somerville, Massachusetts.
Secretly Ironic 