#application advice

Well first of all, I’m actually not getting my PhD in English Lit - my PhD is in American Studies and I actually am much more closely affiliated with African-American Studies. Second of all, I am working class and Irish and first gen and disabled and femme and bi and all of the things that make it so this next part might seem ridiculous but... a PhD IS a job. I currently HAVE a job in academia. If I wasn’t doing this I would have to do something else and I would almost certainly like it less. So why not do a job I like for five years? Plenty of rich people do things they enjoy without the expectation of taking it further. With that being said, I do intend to take it further if I can. I am an excellent scholar. My work is timely and important and beautiful. There might not be a lot of jobs out there but there will always be SOME. I am also working in a field that is actually expanding and hiring more people rather than contracting. I think there is a general and lamentable movement to paint the humanities as obsolete/the least “useful” of subjects but this just isn’t something I engage with because, to me, it is so obviously flawed and false. I am pretty confident I will get some kind of job after my degree, even if it’s not a teaching job, and it will be a job that is much better than what I could have got without it. You can do lots of things with a PhD other than teach.

TL:DR: Basically, I think people who tell working class people that “there are no jobs in academia” miss three crucial facts:

1. A PhD IS a job in academia

2. Working class people are allowed to do things for fun just like rich people and not everything has to have a capitalistic “purpose”

3. The reality is that you will get a better job with a PhD than without one and anyone who says otherwise lives in a privileged dream world where they were already in contact with the right people and in line for the right jobs and have a MUCH higher ceiling for an “acceptable” or “good” salary than someone like me who grew up in poverty has

Hey! This is going to get rambly so I apologize now lol.

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First things first, I was ranked 11 in a class of 600 and therefore in the top 7 and 10 percent of my class and was automatically accepted to UT. From what I've heard, they quite literally might've put my application in an accepted pile without reading any of my essays or extracurriculars.

Next, I was a very dreamy high schooler and wanted to go to the Ivy League and become some CDC researcher developing vaccines (this is a way more insane thing to say in 2022 than it was in 2014), but what did I choose to write about in my essay? The school library. I was called my library's mascot. I got to school every morning 2 hours before class to do homework and wait for the library to open. I worked in our "bistro" which was a stockroom where we sold coffee and did homework while I hung out with my friends. I had a stack of mugs and repaired my textbooks in the workroom. My librarian was like a second mother. I was in book club and anime club in the afternoons and decorated with the students for the holidays. I wrote the coziest vignette of community and home that I knew.

At the time, I didn't know that this is exactly what I was looking for in college. I wanted to be surrounded by people I didn't necessarily call friends, but just people who knew what it was like to be one of those in-between kids who didn't do sports, or band, or theatre, but loved to be consumed by stories. I applied to UT as a Biology major with a focus in microbiology and was accepted. I would graduate UT 4 years later as an English major with a certificate in Creative Writing with a focus in Poetry, but I feel like that conclusion would probably make much more sense than biology to anyone who read my essay.

I hope you write with passion and honesty on whatever your topic is and get in with the major you want!

And if you don't trust me, my fave May Gao does essay reviewing cheap or free for less advantaged students: https://www.collabadvising.com/essays

Going to add more about UT below, I swear I loved it, there's just a lot wrong with the way most schools work and I don't want you going in completely blind.

NOTES ON UT

Freshman classes are designed to weed people out of in-demand majors (CRUEL!!! but I was told this on multiple occasions faculty). Intro classes are notoriously difficult for calculus, biology, chemistry, and organic chemistry. You will probably fail your first test. It's okay (my roommate was our high school valedictorian and failed our first chem test and cried all night). I got back to back 32, 33, and 76 on chem tests and barely passed with a D. I survived. Fun Fact: former VP of the school got exclusively Cs in his intro classes.

Pick the major you want the most BUT if you are unsure or may want to double major, choose the major that is the most selective. This includes Comp Sci, any of the communications school, the business school, and engineering. These majors are extremely hard to once you are in and attempt to do an internal transfer. When I was trying to transfer into Moody for film, they told me they only accept 1 internal transfer A YEAR.

This school is a class divide. Coming from a working-class Hispanic family and from a not great public high school, I was absolutely broken by the amount of people with summer houses, no debt, loans, or work-study, who studied abroad multiple semesters, went out every night or even every weekend. If you are not White, Indian, or Asian, you will have to be active to find your people. There are tons of culture groups and clubs, but it's jarring when most of your classes are homogenous just because of who actually gets into UT.

As the #UCAS deadlines draw near I thought I'd share some of my tips on writing a #personalstatement for #lawschool and see my own submission from when I applied.

As the UCAS deadline draws near I thought I would repost a question I once got on how to write your personal statement. Also if you are looking for an example, I have included the original personal statement that I wrote when applying for my five choices below. Hope this helps!

Question:

Hello, I am a college student, and I am looking to apply to law school. I have already narrowed down my…

Hello! I’m so glad you’re interested in MIT because I absolutely love it here 😊 For MIT and really for any school, there are two types of students: depth and breadth. Depth students dabble in many things but have one or two things that they do really, really well, and breadth students dabble in many things and do well (not necessarily amazingly well, but well enough) in a lot of them, with a slight focus in one field. To say it in another way, if activities are a scale of 1-5 (5 being a lot of involvement/achievement), depth students have some 1-3 activities and a few 5 activities while breadth students have a lot of 2-3 activities and some 4 activities, maybe one 5 activity.

I was personally a breadth student: I was in a ton of clubs (science, business, entrepreneurship, community service), volunteered, played a sport, competed in music, did summer internships, and had good grades. Honestly, I probably would not have been able to do what I did in high school now as a college student, so I’m not going to tell you to do everything you can get your hands on. But I would definitely try to explore as many clubs and activities as possible to find what you’re interested in. Usually, you have more than one interest (for me, that could be medicine + video production or journalism or entrepreneurship or languages), and doing something to pursue that interest is what every school wants. They want to see you show that you’re interested in something, whether that’s participating in every biology club that you can or starting a biology club or whatever.

Two big things colleges really like are communication skills and leadership. That sounds really obvious, but I’m going to emphasize it again because these show so many facets of your personality: maturity, collaboration, and drive. I’m personally not a fan of public speaking, nor am I particularly “leaderly,” but I’ve found my comfort level in public speaking and leadership and developed that. I think a lot of people think of leadership as “I’m going to be the president of every club!” and while that’s great, because it shows your passion for things, it’s honestly pretty unrealistic and they don’t expect every student to have it. You can lead by being an example for other students, by working with others and ensuring clear communication, and that is also very important.

Lastly, for MIT specifically, we specifically like hard-working people. I think that’s a large part of why I got in: I was doing a lot of stuff and managing to balance all of it, so MIT knew I could handle the coursework. At the same time, I had interests in specific fields I wanted to pursue, and I knew I wanted to become a doctor, so they knew I had the drive to succeed. While a lot of other schools (cough Harvard) like to see a lot of leadership, people doing leader stuff blah blah blah, MIT focuses a lot on the potential a student has. Actually, that last phrase can be applied to most schools; they want to see that you’ve made the best of what you have in your high school, taking advantage of the resources available and making an effort to find resources that aren’t available. They look at what you’ve done to gauge what you can do in college.