Personal Statement

Personal Statement

Carys Goodwin on applying for postgraduate study, anxiety, imposter syndrome, and wondering if she was an imposter in the group of imposter syndrome sufferers.

When I picture graduate school selection panels, I picture the iconic scene in every genre of movie from Billy Elliot to The Shawshank Redemption – a large, old hall or room; a long desk, with a row of glasses-wearing middle aged examiners sitting behind it; and a single chair, placed comically far away from the desk, destined for the applicant. 

In my variation, however, the examiners sit across a size-12-times-new-roman-justified-pdf that reeks of desperate platitudes, clichés, and hundreds of words that are never quite able to encapsulate the passion for the subject it’s applying for. It’s a personal statement, and it was born of fire, tears, and a blood sacrifice to whichever satanic entity takes care of university admissions. 

One of the examiners asks a question, like “what makes you a good fit for this university,” and the size-12-times-new-roman-justified-pdf vomits out a paragraph about how it once visited the campus and fell utterly, undeniably in love, and about how its best pdf friends are ones written by Famous Lecturer there. Another examiner carefully peers over his glasses, star struck. The strings soar. The camera pans. Then it’s scene-end, lights-off, complete radio silence bar the gentle sound of size-12-times-new-roman-justified-pdf crinkling itself into embarrassed oblivion. 

Well, in any case, that’s what I pictured at four am after checking all four of my university application portals for the twelfth time since twelve.

For a lot of people, applying to do postgrad is a natural next step. After all, the proliferation of university degrees is supposedly deflating their value; and with the chances of getting a job straight out of university increasingly dire, it’s a good choice. You stay in your favourite city, you stick with your friends, and you add a couple of letters to your name. 

I wanted to get out of New Zealand. For years I’ve been telling people left and right that “I’m going to do my masters in the UK,” as though speaking it would make it true. For much of that time, I barely gave a second thought towards the applications, beyond the fact that I would have to do them in good time. It’d be easy, right? 

Wrong. I had no idea of what I was getting myself into, and no idea that it would turn my relaxing Christmas break into a hellish looping nightmare of trawling through grad school forums and feeling constantly ready to scream. 

When you start applying for universities overseas, there’s always a checklist of bits and pieces you need: a CV, referees, transcripts, fifty quid or a hundred bucks, the GRE (if you’re heading to the US), and a personal statement or research proposal. University websites are littered with advice about getting everything in on time, the grades and qualifications you need to apply with, and the length of your piece of writing. From there, you’re free to express yourself as you wish. 

Naively, I first thought I’d pick one university and just go from there. It wasn’t until after I’d submitted everything that I found out it was normal to apply to four, five, six, twelve, twenty-seven times. So, I applied for a second. A few weeks later, once the panic started to set in, I applied to two more. 

Then there’s the most difficult bit – writing your personal statement. For my first application, I placed the emphasis on ‘personal’. It was about me, and my hopes and dreams; less so about the course I was trying to get into. This was a mistake, because it turns out universities actually also want to know your research interests and the papers you’d take. 

My second application was a research proposal instead of a statement, but my last two were the complete opposite of my first. Controlled, almost clinical, and lacking a lot of the passion that I had hoped would make my first application stand out. You have to confront your insecurities and the voice at the back of your head telling you you’re not good enough, and you have to do it in style. And once you’ve applied, you’re left to wade through toxic thought after toxic thought until an email comes through. Then the imposter syndrome sets in.

“Imposter syndrome” describes the way high achievers are unable to accept that their successes are their own, and as a result are constantly worried they might be “found out” as “imposters”. It affects some demographics more than others, and graduate students are one of the groups that often report the phenomenon the most. Imposter syndrome is when you feel like all of your achievements have been accidents; that you’re not actually smart enough to have arrived where you are, and you should be concerned that everyone will find out.

For New Zealanders, imposter syndrome seems to work well alongside our “tall poppy syndrome”. The humbling and egalitarian language we use to describe our successes turns inward, and we believe that we don’t really do anything of note. It implies that we’re never quite allowed to be as good at something as we might actually be – and when you’re staking your future on achievements you’re not sure are yours, it’s easy to struggle through the process.

It can be difficult to recognise when your symptoms are more than just indicators of general stress; and in situations where the stress can last for months on end and caused by factors outside of your control (i.e. waiting for the admissions people to admit or not admit you), this can be difficult to deal with. 

Then I started to wonder if these feelings of inadequacy were indicative of the fact that I wasn’t adequate: that I was an imposter in the group of imposter syndrome sufferers, and I couldn’t really have it because I wasn’t good enough to be at that stage in my life yet. It was very confusing, and I think feeling imposter syndrome about imposter syndrome is actually a symptom. Imposter syndrome can lead to anxiety, stress, low self-confidence, depression, shame, and self-doubt – a jungle juice cocktail that should really be titled How to Never Get Any Sleep Ever Again. Add into this the fact that I spent hours browsing clickbait articles explaining how to get into top universities and illegally downloading other personal statements from dark corners of Google, and I was thinking I shouldn’t have even bothered applying because I was never going to get in. 

When I talk about the anxiety of applying to graduate school, this is what I mean – and even though I felt isolated at times, it turns out I was not the only one. There are entire communities of soon-to-be Masters and PhD students wasting their days online watching application results rolling in. 

Part of the way through the application-waiting process, I found a Slate article documenting one of the most popular grad student websites – The Grad Cafe. Titled “Breaking Grads: How an awful grad school admissions site exposes Gen Y’s job-search angst,” the author (who wasn’t applying herself) spent quite a few words discussing how sites like the Grad Café encourage people getting “addicted” to anxiety, and provided too many people with “faux expertise.” I remember being thoroughly unimpressed with her analysis. “You don’t get it,” I thought, “cause you’re not doing it.” The results page – where people post the results of their application, be it acceptance or rejection – was quite helpful, because it showed me at which point I would be likely to find out for myself. 

The Grad Café is just one of a few places that you can go – my favourite two were Reddit (the subreddits /r/gradadmissions, /r/gradschool, and /r/askacademia) and The Student Room (UK based, so more helpful with UK admissions than the Grad Café, which was US-centric). 

I went through whole threads from the 2014-2015 application round (I’m talking thousands of posts here), following the journeys of random usernames as their process unfolded. When I saw that one of ones I’d become mildly attached to, who’d been rejected from Oxford the year before, had made it, I cried. I’m not exactly sure it was healthy (in fact I’m fairly sure none of my experience of applying to grad school was healthy), but it was soothing. It also taught me some peculiar things – like exactly what each update on a particular online portal meant. If you’ve applied to University College London and it updates to “currently being processed by admissions”, check it after UK midnight and your offer should appear. Just like clockwork. 

Some universities over-offer courses, knowing that only a certain percentage will accept – skewing the way acceptance data appears. Oxford and Cambridge are two of the only UK institutions that routinely publish not only the numbers doing the course, but the number of offers, meaning if you wanted to be sneaky and apply to the courses with the highest acceptance rate, you would be able to do so.

Alex*, from /r/gradadmissions said, “I checked gradcafe, [this] subreddit and email obsessively, including immediately after waking up and before sleeping. I only ever did something like this with such consistency with checking messages with my first girlfriend. Februgatory is real.”

Similarly, Charlie* pointed to how it exacerbated their depression, explaining, “I was definitely more depressed while waiting to hear back on my applications than the months prior. I haven’t been eating as well, had trouble getting to bed at a reasonable time, had little motivation... standard depression symptoms. They all were substantially worse during this process.” 

I also asked my new internet friends what about applying ought to change, so that future applicant might have an easier time of it all. Rachel* made a point that I could identify with, saying, “I do not think there is enough information out there about effectively applying to graduate school. Sometimes I just wish admissions committees would be more straightforward about what they are looking for from candidates instead of flowering up their admissions websites.” Given that I had no idea how to structure a personal statement until I’d read far beyond the admission websites, I, too, think it would be good to have clearer and more detailed explanations of what universities want. She also felt frustrated by the reliance on test scores. “Obviously, an extremely low test score is a red flag for a number of reasons, but I think that weeding out people with above average test scores and not even looking at their application is a serious mistake.” When you’ve spent four years getting an undergrad degree, it can be immensely frustrating to have all your work undermined by a single standardised test. 

For Charlie*, it’s the perpetual cliff-hanger of having no idea what was happening with their applications. “The lack of updates and timely response needs to change. Out of the 11 schools I applied to, while I do expect I’m on several unofficial wait lists, fucking seven of them never gave me official decisions.”

The decision, of course, is what you’re catapulting towards. A yes or a no; an email telling you to check your online portal. It’s why you’re constantly checking the Grad Café results page for hints as to when your own decision might come, and it’s why you’ve memorised every stage of the application process and know that sometimes it’ll take 5-10 business days for your application to move from one stage to another at a particular university. 

So, yes, I got offers. But that didn’t mean the feelings of inadequacy dissipated – they intensified because I started thinking it was a complete joke. I didn’t even cry with gusto, as I had thought I would when dreaming of that moment. 

I know, I know, you’re thinking ‘you poor thing’ fairly sarcastically as I complain about having to make a decision about where to go, but when you pour everything you’ve got into convincing universities that you’ve got what it takes, it’s pretty weird to then tell them to go away. I’ve still got my second choice application open, my response pending, just in case.

But for others, like Jamie*, there’s no happy ending after the war with application websites, like the Seventeen Years Later chapter in the final Harry Potter book. “I did not get into anywhere I applied. It was pretty disheartening since you pretty much need a masters to have any upward mobility in my field. It was also really frustrating because nobody wanted to give me any insight into what I could do better. I wasn’t even asking why I wasn’t accepted, I was just asking what I can do to strengthen my application. I will try again, but I don’t really know what to do differently because schools like to guard those things pretty closely apparently.” 

As articulated by Charlie*, “the whole process is horribly emotionally draining,” but I don’t want to end on such a sad note. What I actually want to end on is the fact that the information is out there. And if I’ve done my job properly by writing this article, your experience won’t be half as lonely, because you’ll know what to expect and where to find others who’re whirling around the same headspace as you are. 

There are many flaws with the application process, but worse is the way you pick at your own; tearing yourself to bits under the illusion there’s no point applying at all.  

And although I may have been melodramatic enough to put everyone off applying at all, you’re probably good enough.

This article first appeared in Issue 14, 2016.
Posted 11:35am Sunday 29th May 2016 by Carys Goodwin.