2. ‘TIS THE SEASON FOR APPLICATIONS: SAMPLE PERSONAL STATEMENT FOR APPLYING TO GRAD SCHOOL

In this second installment of my series sharing old application materials, I make available two personal statements that I wrote when I applied to grad school. It was my very first time producing a personal statement (also known as a statement of purpose), and I could not find any good models to emulate. Instead, I turned to my undergraduate professors. They read draft after draft after draft, giving me feedback on each round, and it took repeated revisions to before the statements were ready to send off.

Now, as a professor, I occasionally find myself on the other side as a member of the admissions committee that reviews applications for the graduate program at UConn. I often wish that all applicants could receive the generous advising that I did. The weakest personal statements I have seen actually remind me of the initial draft of my own personal statements. Many weak statements have potential and could be so much better if only applicants understood the purpose of the personal statement.

As might be expected, the bar is higher for applications to Phd and joint MA/Phd programs than for terminal masters programs. For applications to doctoral and joint programs, the purpose of the personal statement is to propose a possible dissertation topic. An excellent statement will clearly describe the topic, explain how it will contribute to the latest research in the chosen field of study, and connect the topic to the research interests of relevant faculty members at that particular school. The statement should also show that the applicant is prepared for grad school. So despite the name, the personal statement is not very personal at all. It is about the applicant’s ideas rather than about the applicant as a person.

Perhaps the biggest mistake I have seen in reviewing graduate applications is that many prospective students write too much about their life experiences, passion for learning, or political commitments but too little about their research interests. I think part of the problem is that applicants think the personal statement is similar to the college essay that they produced when they applied to college. It is not. If you want to write about your life experiences or political commitments, then do so only insofar as they relates to your research interests, and keep that part brief. As for passion, you don’t need to dwell on it because it will come through if you convincingly argue that your research topic will contribute to the scholarship. After all, if you are extremely passionate about a topic that does not have any scholarly significance, then a doctoral program has no reason to accept you. (I should point out that your statement does not actually commit you to the topic. You can later choose a different topic for your dissertation.)

For terminal masters programs, the standard for personal statements is a little lower. A good statement should describe the applicant’s research interests but does not have to propose a potential dissertation topic. Taking the first sample personal statement below as an example, a prospective masters student might describe his/her interests merely as “the intellectual and cultural history of the Republic of Vietnam (1955-1975).” But an applicant to a doctoral or joint program is expected to propose a more specific topic, such as “the intellectual and cultural discourse in South Vietnam’s print and non-print media, with particular attention to its colonial origins” and the “interplay between the government’s attempts to shape the people’s understanding of the past and how the South Vietnamese conceived of their country’s identity.”

I think the root of the problem is that many applicants do not receiving advising from their current or former professors regarding their personal statement. Advising is key because personal statements will probably be unlike anything a student has written in college. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it doesn’t even make sense to put so much effort into putting together an application without seeking advice from trusted mentors. Applications to grad school require letters of recommendation, and applicants should ask their recommenders to offer feedback on their personal statement. Recommenders who read personal statements will also be able to better describe the applicant’s research interests. The best applications will form a coherent whole because each piece – the letters of recommendation, personal statement, writing sample, and transcript – provide different facets of an applicant’s academic profile. And the best way to achieve that coherence is to seek letters from professors that are familiar with your work and that have read your personal statement.

The two sample statements are from my applications to joint MA/Phd programs after I graduated from college. (I never applied to any terminal masters programs because those were mostly unfunded.) My undergraduate institution was not especially prestigious (at least back then), and my mentors impressed it on me that I needed to produce the best application I could in order to compete against graduates of Ivy League schools that would also be applying. So I set to work. My college did not offer Vietnamese history, and I spent hours reading up on it and trying to figure out what topic I should propose. It felt like I was simultaneously teaching and taking a new college course of my own design. At the time, I had not yet decided between studying premodern and modern Vietnam, so I drafted two different statements. Graduate programs with professors of premodern Vietnamese history received the “premodern” statement, and those with professors of modern Vietnamese history received the “modern” statement. The contents of both statements reflect my research interests at the time and what was then the latest research, though the statements would be quite outdated now. In the end, I was accepted into every school to which I applied, including the ones that were for premodern Vietnam.

For the record, I want to state that I firmly believe that a strong application will override any misgivings regarding an applicant’s undergraduate institution (that is, as long as the institution wasn’t a diploma mill). If you went to a lower ranked college like I did, then as long as your personal statement and other application materials are excellent, the admissions committee will be too impressed to cavil about the prestige of your alma mater. There’s never any need to apologize for attending a lesser-known college. Instead, what is important is that you demonstrate in your application materials that your undergraduate education has prepared you for graduate studies. Indeed, I think having some experience at institutions that are outside the cloistered world of the Ivy League and other elite schools was good preparation for becoming a professor, and I am glad that I did not spend my entire education inside that bubble.

SAMPLE PERSONAL STATEMENT FOR MODERN VIETNAMESE HISTORY

I would like to earn a doctorate in Southeast Asian history and specialize in Vietnam because I find the study of Vietnamese history personally and intellectually satisfying. I hope for a career as a scholar and professor, and I am interested in both researching and teaching. As a Vietnamese growing up in America, I have always been struck by how my parents and many other refugees mourn the fall of Saigon not merely as a military defeat but as the demise of a vibrant cultural, social, and intellectual world. I was taught to regard post-1954 South Vietnam as a continuation of the intellectual and artistic flowering in the late colonial era, the 1920s and 1930s, and I would like to reevaluate the relationship between these two periods.

I am particularly fascinated with Hue-Tam Ho Tai’s Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution, David G. Marr’s Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945, and Neil Jamieson’s Understanding Vietnam. Marr argues that Vietnamese intellectuals during the late colonial period rejected tradition, searched for a more suitable worldview, and, thus, found communism; North Vietnam was a direct product of the intellectual ferment of the 1920s and 1930s. In contrast, in Tai’s study, what started as the non-ideological radicalism of the 1920s resulted in three divergent movements in the 1930s: communism, Trotskyism, and progressivism. Using different terminology, Jamieson also discusses different strands of interwar artistic and intellectual development and traces them, primarily through the prism of literature, to their later transformations in both North and South Vietnam. Taken together, Tai’s and Jamieson’s arguments would suggest that the heritage of the interwar period had a profound impact on South Vietnam. Jamieson finds that the individualistic, effusively emotional trend of literature that began in 1930s Hanoi reached its peak in 1960s Saigon. The literary works of the Tư Lực Văn Đoàn(Self-Reliance Literary Group) that, for Tai, represented progressivism in the interwar north had become classics in South Vietnam and were enshrined as required reading in public schools.

Since 1930s progressivism traces its origin to 1920s radicalism, and progressivism survived in South Vietnam, the intellectual and cultural discourse in post-1954 South Vietnam can be partially traced back to the very origins of the Vietnamese Revolution. Because most historiography on pre-1975 modern Vietnam has been political or military and has emphasized the narrative of an independent North Vietnam rising from its colonial roots and triumphing over the South, South Vietnam appears as a political deviation in the historical trend of modern Vietnamese history. Yet the continuing importance of the interwar heritage suggests continuity rather than deviation. Of course, this continuity—representative of the urban, educated, ethnically Vietnamese middle and upper classes—did not encompass all Southern experiences, particularly not the Southern insurgents. In fact, schooling South Vietnamese youth with a literary canon that culminated in interwar literature could even be seen as a means of enhancing that continuity.

I would like to examine the intellectual and cultural discourse in South Vietnam’s print and non-print media, with particular attention to its colonial origins. I am interested in the interplay between the government’s attempts to shape the people’s understanding of the past and how the South Vietnamese conceived of their country’s identity. How were the intellectual, cultural and political movements of the late colonial period developed, discontinued, or adapted in reaction to the environment of the South? How did Southerners view the interwar past relative to themselves and how did the government attempt to shape that memory? What continuities and discontinuities with the interwar past were enhanced, suppressed, or imagined to shore up South Vietnamese legitimacy and create an identity distinct from the communist North? What aspects of the divergence between the intellectual and cultural climates of North and South Vietnam occurred after 1954 or which ones can be traced to an earlier development? Probing the real and imagined colonial origins of the South Vietnamese intellectual and cultural discourse helps explain to what extent South Vietnam was merely a deviation and to what extent it was an alternative outcome of the Vietnamese Revolution.

The [school] would be an excellent place for pursuing this topic. I have met with [professor], and he encouraged me to examine the history of South Vietnam. His interests in the history of twentieth-century Vietnamese literature, especially the interwar years, dovetail nicely with my interest in both periods. [School] is also one of the few schools with a Vietnamese linguist and regular classes on Vietnamese literature. Furthermore, the proximity to the vibrant Vietnamese community of [city] offers access to former residents of South Vietnam and their memories. This topic could be fruitfully supplemented with interviews with Vietnamese exiles about how they viewed (and were taught to view) the interwar period under the South Vietnamese government.

I believe that I am prepared for graduate study at [school]. I received Seattle University’s [name of undergraduate scholarship and description of it]. I graduated, [Latin honors], with departmental honors in history and a second major in French, and completed the rigorous two-year Honors Program. My history major included a theory course, a course on Southeast Asia, and two research seminars using primary sources, including a senior thesis. The Holocaust seminar paper recently won the [name of award and brief description]; I intend to turn that paper into a journal article. I already meet the language requirements for modern Vietnamese history. I am in fluent in French and studied abroad in Grenoble, France. I grew up bilingual and earned a bilingual diploma for Vietnamese and English from the International Baccalaureate program while still in high school. Currently, I am studying Chinese and doing preliminary research using the University of Washington’s rich resources for Vietnamese history. My GRE scores were [number] for verbal, [number] for math, and [number] for analytical writing.

SAMPLE PERSONAL STATEMENT FOR PREMODERN VIETNAMESE HISTORY

I would like to earn a doctorate in Southeast Asian history and specialize in Vietnam because I find the study of Vietnamese history personally and intellectually satisfying. I hope for a career as a scholar and professor, and I am interested in both researching and teaching. Because I trace my maternal roots to the lower Mekong plain, whose population includes many minorities, I have always been interested in the history of Miền Nam (the southern third of Vietnam). Recently, I have been increasingly drawn to premodern Vietnam through the works of Keith Taylor, Li Tana, George Dutton, and Nola Cooke. I am deeply interested in studying the annexation and settlement of Miền Nam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through the framework of ethnicity and regional identity. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Vietnamese breakaway kingdom of Đàng Trong occupied modern-day central Vietnam and annexed the Cambodian-owned Mekong plain. Taylor, Li, and Cooke have all argued that Đàng Trong established a new way of acting Vietnamese that was less traditional and more experimental. However, Dutton’s and Li’s works on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries give particular emphasis to central Vietnam instead of Miền Nam, the farthest frontier of southward expansion. Only very recently has Choi Byung Wook studied ethnic relations in the lower south, but his study is about the nineteenth century Nguyễn dynasty.

I am particularly interested in reading Choi’s “Vietnamisation of Southern Vietnam during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century” against Li’s Nguyễn Cochinchina. Li, concentrating on the social and economic history of central Vietnam, argues that Đàng Trong’s absorption of indigenous Cham and highlander cultures resulted in a localization of Vietnamese identity. Choi, with a more definite ethnic focus, even argues that, by the early 1800s, the Cambodians, Chinese, and Vietnamese of the far south lived separately but cooperatively to form a regional identity. Only with the coercive assimilationist policies of the 1830s did Vietnamese ethnic identity become more rigid and ethnic interactions increase. Yet Choi and Li often use strikingly similar evidence of ethnic interactions to support their arguments for, respectively, Đàng Trong experimentation and 1830s rigidity, evidence such as the Vietnamization of foreign cults and intermarriage with non-Vietnamese.

Taking both Choi and Li’s arguments, it would appear that ethnic interactions constituted a trend in Vietnamese behavior which, although originating within an experimental ethnic identity, actually accelerated when that same identity rigidified. This acceleration considerably complicates the close connection between an experimental Vietnamese identity and the adaptation of foreign cultures suggested by Li. Did this behavioral continuity form an underlying current regardless of changes in official ideology?  Or was there a superficial similarity between cultural adaptations of Đàng Trong and the Nguyễn dynasty that masked two different forms of Vietnamese identity and ethnic aggression? And if identity in Miền Nam was predominantly regional until the 1830s, beginning when can a regional identity be discussed for the southern frontier rather than a collection of local and ethnic identities? Examining identity in the far south using Choi’s framework of ethnicity and regionalism for the Đàng Trong years would illuminate the continuities and discontinuities in Miền Nam’s identities prior to the 1830s reorganization.

[School] would be an excellent place to pursue this topic. [Professor]’s work has been very influential in my understanding of premodern Vietnamese history. I have contacted him, and he has shown interest in the issues raised above. Besides [school]’s strength in Southeast Asian history, it differs from other schools in that it offers multiple Southeast Asian languages at advanced levels, particularly classical languages. Furthermore, it has the best library for Vietnamese history in North America and is the only university on the continent to offer instruction in nôm, the Vietnamese demotic script.

I firmly believe that I am prepared for graduate study at [school]. Although Vietnamese history was not offered at Seattle University, my undergraduate education developed the skills to explore the topic on my own, and I have done extensive independent reading using the University of Washington’s rich resources for Vietnamese history. At Seattle University, I completed the rigorous two-year Honors Program and earned departmental honors in history and a second major in French to graduate [Latin honors]. The Honors Program is a chronologically ordered “great books” approach to Western Civilization that integrates history, literature, and philosophy. The Program devotes two history courses to primary source analysis and two to teaching students to engage in historiographical debates. The Honors Program is known to be excellent preparation for graduate school because of its seminar method, paper conferences, and oral final exams.

My history major included a theory course, a course on Southeast Asia, and two research seminars using primary sources, one of which produced a senior thesis. The Holocaust seminar paper was presented at the National Conference of Undergraduate Research and subsequently published in its 2003 Proceedings. The paper recently won the [name of award and brief description]; I intend to turn that paper into a journal article. My senior thesis on the Pennsylvania Germans was presented at [conference name]; it has been published online in the [undergraduate journal at my undergraduate institution]. Candidates for the senior thesis at Seattle University are expected to do original research, and I was awarded departmental honors without any suggested changes.

In addition, I have had significant language training. As a French major, I studied abroad in Grenoble, France, for six months and am already fluent. I grew up bilingual and earned a bilingual diploma for Vietnamese and English from the International Baccalaureate program while still in high school. Because of my background in Vietnamese literature, I was twice asked to present Vietnamese poetry at the annual Seattle University Medieval Poetry Reading, sponsored by the English department. Currently, I am studying Chinese.

Besides the awards mentioned above, I received [name of undergraduate scholarship and description of it]. In addition, I graduated with a [cumulative GPA] ([GPA in my majors]) and received the award for [description of award]. My GRE scores were [number] for verbal, [number] for math, and [number] for analytical writing.

THE FEEDBACK I WOULD GIVE MYSELF

Looking back now, here’s what I think I did right:

You may notice that I described my qualifications in much greater detail in the “premodern statement” than the “modern” one. I was already less interested in premodern Vietnam, so I couldn’t come up with as much to say about a potential dissertation topic. I was also less prepared in terms of my language skills because I had just starting taking first-year Chinese. Therefore, I tried to strengthen my “premodern application” by discussing my qualifications in greater detail. In contrast, the “modern” statement features a much more complex research topic, and the fluency with which I described it was itself a more effective demonstration of my qualifications than a description of my undergraduate grades or conference attendance.