My UK University Personal Statement

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Last week I wrote a short manifesto on behalf of the em dash, which is now my most popular article. Thanks to all those who shared it around!

In it I touched on the plight of Zach Yadegari — an 18-year-old tech millionaire who got rejected from all his top schools, and then, as you do, tried to enlist Elon Musk in a campaign to “Make Admissions Fair Again”.

To prove that Harvard, Yale, and Stanford’s rejection letters were unfair and un-American, Yadegari posted his personal statement online. Opinions on its quality were… mixed. The ensuing Discourse — which has now spilled from X onto Substack — has morphed into a much more interesting conversation about why the college essay system that US universities rely on is cringe and dishonourable. Scott Alexander writes:

Writing, done honorably, is a good and valuable skill. Colleges would do well to select for it. Or at least it’s in my self-interest to say that.

But there’s nothing honorable about a college admissions essay. It resembles nothing so much as prostitution - not the fun sort of prostitution you read about in Aella blogposts, but the kind that appears in news stories on human trafficking. You have to twist your innermost self into a marketable commodity - smiling and telling your violators how much fun you’re having, while your soul screams the whole way through.

Five, maybe ten percent of applicants are some kind of special snowflake whose father was murdered when they were five years old. As he lay there bleeding out, he said “Daughter, my whole life, I dreamed of being the first LGBT person to get a PhD in the study of ancient Assyria. Now that dream has been taken from me. With my dying breath, I give you my trowel and hand-painted figurine of Tiglath-Pileser III, in the hopes that one day you will succeed where I failed”. She spent the next twelve years sweeping chimneys to support herself and her paraplegic mother, before one day - rotting in jail after protesting police brutality - she started talking to her cellmate and found he was Behnam Abu Alsoof, legendary expert on the ancient Near East. He offered to tutor her in cuneiform, and at age seventeen she published her first paper, a daring thesis claiming that the Elamite Kingdom, long thought a victim of foreign invaders, was actually destroyed by internalized misogyny. Now she wants to attend Dartmouth, the college her father always dreamed of making it to, with the top Assyriology program in the world, in order to continue her groundbreaking work on Bronze Age sexuality.

The rest of us are just some kid who wants to go to college because that’s where all the good jobs are. If you really press us, we’ll say something like “idk biology seems pretty cool”. We encountered an approximately average number of hardships. Once when we got our wisdom teeth taken out, the surgeon said we had the weirdest reaction to anaesthesia he’d ever seen - does that count as a hardship?

The UK does things slightly differently. When I was applying, the only writing sample I had to send in was a 4,000 character ‘personal statement’, which is different from a college essay in that the point is not to tell a gripping story but to squeeze in as many academic humblebrags as you can in 4,000 characters, justifying their inclusions with a series of platitudinous one-line ‘hooks’ which ultimately serve to explain, at the end, why you want to apply for the course.

I found this process painful, but not as painful as I would’ve found writing a college essay. Out of interest, during lockdown, I listened to every episode of the Inside the Yale Admissions Office Podcast, and holy mackerel: the admissions officers made the writing process sound as nice as they could, but it really is a form of prostitution.

This morning, in light of said Discourse, friend of the blog

Ari Shtein

uploaded his college essay — a courageous act, though not as courageous as

Nicholas Decker

, who posted his home address on X after going viral for a Substack essay which, consisting mainly of quotes from the Founding Fathers, asked at what point political violence in the US becomes appropriate.

In that spirit, here is my personal statement. It got me into 4/5 of the places I applied to (damn you, St. Andrews), but maybe the structure of it be of use to readers who are applying in the near future.