For Every Personal Statement, a Persona

“The summer is a great time to put pen to paper on the college admissions essay,” I advise the families and students I consult with. At this point, half of the room nods knowingly, while the other, younger half giggles politely to itself, noting the glaring anachronism. Forget the elephant; who let the dinosaur in the room? For those wondering whether pen and paper were still indispensable tools for writing, I’m here to tell you: they are not. 

The methods for essay writing may have changed–along with so many other aspects of the college search and application process–but the unique sense of dread the personal statement inspires could unite generations. Ask a young person to write their story in a way that is compelling, yet authentic; humorous, yet appropriate to the situation; intelligent, yet humble; all for an unknown audience holding the power to grant or withhold them admission, and it’s no wonder students so often struggle with this piece of the college admissions puzzle. 

It’s a tall order, and wrestling with it is kind of the point. But it doesn’t have to be painful. There are ways to make writing the personal essay easier, and in a world filled with AI-enabled temptations, it may not be what you'd think. It may even be something as ancient as pen and paper. 

“If you get hung up on the process or are struggling to write about yourself,” I’m quick to add, hoping to recover lost ground, “imagine that you’re writing about someone else. Approach your story as if you were writing about an alternate version of yourself, a persona.” 

At this point, they’ve put their phones down.

“You don’t even have to write in the first person. In fact, it’s better if you don’t.”

At this point, I know I have their full attention. 

If it was good enough for Caesar…

Let’s be clear: There’s nothing particularly natural about referring to oneself in the third person. Yet, researchers have found that this slight linguistic switch from the first to third person can have far-ranging psychological benefits, especially when facing potentially emotional decisions or situations. Illeism, as the rhetorical device is known, adapted from the Latin ille, meaning “he” or “that,” gives the sensation of emotional neutrality. Similarly, it helps distance the writer from what is being communicated, giving what is written the illusion of objectivity, even historicity. Perhaps that’s what Julius Caesar hoped for when he wrote “Caesar avenged the public,” instead of the first-person “I avenged the public,” in his personal account of the Gallic War. If this strategy worked for him, it just might benefit today’s college applicants, too. 

Put the persona in personal statement 

With this in mind, I then lead students through an exercise in which they imagine, then illustrate, an alternate version of themselves with whom they can identify their third-person storytelling. The drawing helps reinforce visually what illeism hopes to accomplish linguistically: to instill the writer with a sense of perceived objectivity and by extension, the emotional distance so often needed to begin writing and thinking more freely about themselves.

To be sure, I gave it a try recently and sketched my persona, Millie, into existence. I then assigned her the characteristics I most wanted to highlight in a personal essay about my bold and slightly contentious decision to spend a year of high school abroad. With my persona and her third-person perspective to shield me, I could write more freely about my 16-year-old self: 

“Millie had never considered herself a bold person. In fact, if she were completely honest with herself, she’d admit that she was as unremarkable qualitatively, in looks, demeanor, and dress, as she was quantitatively, even geographically speaking. There was no hiding it: she was an average student from a middle class family of four, living somewhere in the middle of America. Millie simply fit in, often without trying and certainly without anyone ever noticing.”

Unflattering, but also completely accurate. However, the clarity with which I described Millie also allowed me to underscore more dramatically her bold departure from the middle—more lovingly, too, I suspect—than if I had written about myself in the first person: 

“And that’s when the adventure began for Millie. No, it wasn’t enough to stand behind the decision she and her family had made for her future, defending it from the naysaying of others. Instead, for the first time in her life, Millie boldly emerged from her place in the middle. In the end, what emboldened Millie the most was not to have made the decision she did, but rather, to have assumed the risk and potential reward of not fitting in, in a way that now everyone noticed.

Shortly thereafter, she boarded her first of many international flights, bound for Madrid.”

Millie had been outlined in ink and now had a story to share, a story that felt in equal parts mine and like that of a best friend. The final step in concluding the essay actually turned out to be the most rewarding: changing “her” to “I.” Millie gave flight to my story, but ultimately, I was the one who boarded the plane all those years ago. The story was now fully and authentically mine for the telling. 

Dot the I

“Don’t forget to dot your i’s,” I add as a parting reminder to my students, who think I’m being out-of-touch again, pedantic. But I’m not. What I’m asking them to do feels really empowering and may be the most satisfying part of this writing process yet. They now get to take this amazing story they’ve just thoughtfully and lovingly told and make it entirely theirs. With the switch of a pronoun, from the third person back to the first, they finally assume their intended role as the lead persona of their very personal essays.

“Feel free to celebrate and repeat after me,” I invite my students when the time is right, “‘I avenged the personal essay.’”