Statements of Purpose and Personal Statements: Genre Conventions and Rhetorical Demands

Last December, I wrote a series of posts, starting here, dedicated to breaking down the academic job search process from application to campus visit. The academic job search was still very much in my memory, still cycling through my credit card payments, and still baffling. But for Master's candidates, the academic job search is still just so much nightmare fuel. Many MAs choose to pursue additional credentialing. That application process creates its own set of anxieties, costs (both personal and fiscal), and problems. But like the academic job market, it relies on careful attention to genre conventions.

Doctoral programs are, it seems, attracting larger pools of applicants, which makes entry more competitive. And while candidates--for either doctoral programs or jobs--can't control where the jobs are or the quality of the competition, there are many factors that they can control. In this post, I'll deal with the personal statement and the statement of intellectual purpose, two separate but similar documents. Transcript bobbles can't be revised, and letters of recommendation follow too long of a timeline to change significantly. (I suppose an MA student could possibly dramatically improve his/her relationship with a referee in a semester. Possibly. Not probably, though, and I certainly wouldn't take that risk.) Elements like the personal statement, the statement of purpose, and the writing sample are fully within each candidate's control.

To be considered for graduate study, candidates submit a dossier, or a collection of materials intended to communicate their academic narrative and potential within that specific program's trajectory. Doctoral admissions are, by and large, holistic decisions which may take the following metrics into account: transcripts, letters, writing samples, GRE scores (either general or subject), and the personal statement or statement of (intellectual) purpose. Know this: the doctoral dossier is a job application, not a biography. It is a PR document with a purpose. Candidates should carefully attend to those elements within their reach to supplement cumulative elements, like GPA or letters.

The rhetorical situation

You have 10-15 minutes to make a positive impression. You are 1 of maybe 100.

Five years of working relationships will be judged quickly.

Admissions committees are exhausted and overtaxed. Give NO reason to be shuffled to the NO pile.

The PS/SoP is a small but important part of a larger dossier.

It’s the portion over which you have the most control.

The committee wants to get a firm sense of how well you might progress through the program, enrich it, and (eventually) become a colleague.

Personal Statement 

Who you are makes you well qualified to succeed in graduate school. 

This includes reflections on success and failure, worldviews, philosophies.

Answer: Why graduate school? Why you? Why that focus? Why that program?

Situate experience in theoretical frames, if relevant and not only novel.

Otherwise, self-check for heavy name dropping.

On that note, careful to mention specific faculty members by name. You can't possibly know a department's internal squabbles, plans, or problems. Outlining a plan to attend a specific university to work with a specific faculty member may backfire if that person is retiring or going on sabbatical. Focus instead on program strengths and opportunities.

Personal experience should be relevant and applicable, not maudlin.

On that: guard against the sappy-sweet or precocious.

Statement of (Intellectual) Purpose

What you know, your future plans, makes you well qualified to succeed in graduate school. 

This includes reflections on future plans and aspirations. 

What will graduate training help you do? Be action-oriented.

In both

How do you fit into the department or program?

What do you have to offer them? What is your potential?

Know your schools. Tailor one or two paragraphs.

Think about the coherence of your educational narrative. Are you claiming overwhelming interest in science and technology but have submitted a writing sample that’s a literary analysis? 

If you do project scattered focus, use the PS or SoP to connect the seemingly disparate points. 

Project maturity, discipline, and active engagement.

Rely on detail in a very short form. Think prose poetry not novel.

Be vivid but also serious.

Focus locally.

A SoP may not include personal details, but a Personal Statement will include a Statement of

Intellectual Purpose. 

Don’t overpromise or overreach (with language or application).

Follow basics of good writing (avoid the “Since I was a child…” intro). It counts.

At this level everyone “loves” what they study (books, literature, teaching, composition).

Have multiple people read. Take revision seriously. Typos are noted.  

               

To prepare

Talk, talk, talk about your research and positionality.

Write, write, write for difference audiences.

Read, read, read the current conversations in your field.

From Candidate to Colleague

I've been fortunate to take part in a few recent professionalism panels intended to prepare current graduate students for the academic job market. Each panelist encouraged their respective audiences to avoid acting like, sounding like, or dressing like graduate students. Good advice, even if it's a bit nebulous and softly offensive. This advice is not intended to mark graduate students as less qualified on the market--and current nattering suggests the opposite--but to encourage candidates to move their discourse and professional identities into a new peer network before they're actually there.

What does it even mean to move from grad student to professor? At the time of entry, students have many models from which to choose; however, those performances of professors in classrooms and at conferences offer only a gloss. What do professors even talk about over dinner? What's protocol for talking about the dissertation? Are new shoes really necessary?

I thought it might be useful to open discussion on that move from job candidate to colleague and to operationalize some of the more obvious markers of graduate student identity. While these points apply most urgently to the current job market, I think they're equally applicable to conferences and other opportunities to meet the people who will be future colleagues.

1. While the dissertation is certainly top of the mind for those about to graduate, it's not especially the most interesting thing to talk about. Work to avoid making it a topic of conversation, primarily because they've already gotten a version of it in the dossier and have or will in the job talk. If someone asks, it's prudent to have the short version ready. No more than 2 minutes should give enough detail to be interesting without reaching the dreaded ramble. And keep it positive: no complaining about committees or deadlines. Once graduate students are close to market time, committee members are colleagues, not evaluators.

2. Polish it up, to the best of your abilities. Pressed pants, clean shoes, business casual at the most relaxed end. Jeans are perhaps appropriate for travel, but be wary. Err on the side of more conservative, rather than less. This doesn't mean that every candidate needs to own a $600 suit, but do pay attention to clothes that fit, are clean, and look professional. (And, yes, I hate this kind of body policing, but the unfortunate reality of the market is that some people are not understanding or compassionate when it comes to these sorts of things.)

3.  First-Name Basis: Your committee members and professors are colleagues now. When talking to other members of the disciplinary community, use of the honorific reminds people of the student positioning.

4. Be conversant in local projects. It surprises many graduate students to learn that their professors have projects outside of dissertation advising and classroom teaching. By knowing the projects their committee members are working on, graduate students show that they can peek beyond the mountain range of the dissertation. Likewise, recognizing search committee members' current work (by looking through recent conference programs, for example) is a good place to find information about recent or ongoing projects. Anyone can read a published article on the plane on the way to the campus visit. A colleague will remember that Professor Smith gave a talk a the Cs in St. Louis. The most well-adjusted academics, in my experience, are those who move away from self-centered models and more toward community-minded ones.

5. Learn the language. Faculty life is thick with acronyms, and TNP is perhaps the most important. Having the knowledge to thoughtfully discuss tenure and promotion expectations means that graduate students are already thinking about their reappointment as assistant professors. Advisers can help here as contact points for home institution requirements. Informed candidates will be familiar with current MLA discussions about the status of TNP while also understanding that expectations are incredibly local and historical.

6. Research all the schools. It's common knowledge that job applicants should know both programmatic and institutional details about each school to which they apply. It is just as important to know this information about home institutions. If, for example, a candidate from an R1 Land Grant institution is applying for a job at an SLAC, that candidate must be able to articulate the ideological and pedagogical connections between those institutions and student populations.

7.  R1 Land Grant? SLAC? Academics trade in acronyms. Reading around in disciplinary journals, attending talks, and talking to professors as colleagues can help.

8. Practice humility, avoid desperation. Even when they are desperate, even when every thought returns to finances and living situations, candidates move to colleagues when they practice open-minded humility and refuse desperation. Self-deprecation is as persuasive as narrow-minded, uninformed self-confidence. Fatalism is rampant in graduate school. Avoid any semblance to the stereotypical grad student in PhD Comics.

9. Redesign documents. CVs shouldn't foreground graduate student activities. No one cares if a candidate served three selfless years as social chair of the Graduate Student Organization. (I was, and it made me sad to learn this.) Quest about for examples of CVs of senior academics. Most departments require that professors upload their CVs to their public site. Use these CVs at models. Writing samples should look like journal articles, not seminar papers.

10. Attend talks. The very best professionalizing I received was free: I attended both job talks by job candidates and research lectures by visiting scholars. Even if the talk was far outside my field, I gained facility with the language that academics use when they speak with other academics, and I learned a great deal about how I wished to be perceived.

All of these fairly minor points help move job candidates from their lived reality to their hoped-for future reality. It's awkward and not-at-all intuitive to be asked to inhibit an identity that's not yet real, but that's exactly the demand for graduate students on the academic job market. Knowing the code and thoughtfully engaging in the expected ways can help move a very anxious graduate student job seeker from job candidate to future colleague.

Training Resilience

I first encountered the idea of resilience as a construct in Resilience: Queer Professors from the Working Class. It is cast there--and in other books with words like "trauma" in the title--as a personality trait that can only be achieved retroactively. That is, you can't just decide to be resilient. It's like the Greek idea of honor. You can't bestow honor on yourself. Someone else has to give it to you. And if my quickie lit review gives any sketch to the theoretical landscape, pain gives us resilience. There's no prior method, no preceding knowledge. Resilience is the outcome of cumulative painful negotiations. (I am not, by the way, in agreement that "that which does not kill us makes us stronger." In fact, that which does not kill us makes us too weak to fend off the next attack.)

I'm unsatisfied with the idea that we can't--that I can't--operationalize coping enough to make it pedagogically useful. What I see is that many good young teachers leave teaching before they've developed the resilience it requires. The burnout rate for public school teachers is still something like three years. (And with as many strictures as they face, it's no wonder.) In many cases, resilience can mask psychologically dangerous situations, but it's a fact of teaching: there's risk, emotional and psychological, so there's the potential for trauma (such as it is; ask me how I feel about blue-collar jobs and injuries if you really want to know how I feel).

The best methods I can come up with for training resilience in new teachers are 1) authentic professional development and 2) collaboration; that is, by asking young scholars to engage in the types of situations they would as professionals, they take risks and develop resilience, because rejection is a fact. I was crushed when someone said something snarky to me at my first academic conference. Now, though, not so much. But it took many conferences, many perceived slights, endless agonized evenings over student papers and emails--running class discussions through my memory to focus in on potential problems--to get there. I'm poking my way through Collaborative Resilience: Moving through Crisis to Opportunity (Goldstein 2012) tonight, and it seems that community is as important as ever. Community in my context implicates cohort building and peer mentoring. I hope I'm offering analog opportunities to my students, but it's nice to get confirmation that our approach is useful beyond community building.

It's Okay to Go

I've put off writing here, but I've been writing everywhere else. Chances are, you've gotten email from me recently. Today. In the last 20 minutes. Email is our communicative currency. We're just symbol trading monkeys anyway, but now we can trade really fast.

Today, in the class I teach, we talked about what to do after the MA is finished. The only options are not 1) enter another graduate program or 2) enter the academic job market. But young scholars are often made to feel that leaving academia--even if they plan to return later--is some kind of once-out-never-in deal.

Well that's just not true. It may be the case that leaving academia and trying to return after a few years as an instructor presents a challenge, especially if the time has been spent doing work that can't directly influence or inform teaching and scholarship. But there's a big wide world out there, and sometimes the best lesson we can learn is how to find our place in it. Graduate school forces that consideration for some people. First we must know what we value and need to live happily. Then we can fit our careers and lifestyles into that plan. Certainly, jobs aren't always fun, and sometimes we have to take jobs that we hate to buy food. Of course. But disabusing new teachers and scholars of the notion of "academic-as-an-identity" (instead of "academic-as-an-approach") can be healthy, even if all it offers is an option for consideration. (Shout out to Teresa Hooper, whose fantastic conversation about academic identity I copied entirely in the previous sentence.) This point is especially relevant as I recall a conversation with a young woman last year: "Well, when I finish my MA, I want to have a baby, but I want to have it in May, so I can maybe adjunct in August, and they'd never have to know." It makes me sad that there are some institutions where her secret baby is a secret best kept close.

As job season ramps up and the jobs become ever-more contingent, I do wonder if this opting out isn't a form of self-advocacy.  It's a bit Timothy Leary, okay, but consider the power of placing well-trained teachers and scholars in public spaces. Teachers and scholars with knowledge of rhetorical situations and exigency and responsive (not reactive) discourse. These are exactly the people we need in the public sphere. 

Taking Time: Food Prep and the Academic Body

As I wrote in yesterday's blog, my environment and schedule as a master's candidate led to a number of problems. After working my way out of the chronic-pain cloud, I had to deal with the aftershocks of 18 months of bad medicine, no exercise, and daily Velveeta. I ate the Velveeta because 1) it was cheap; 2) its use required little to no culinary knowledge; and 3) okay, fine, it tasted pretty good to me. Master's students at my university made about $650 before taxes (EDIT: that figure is for the first year, the non-teaching year. Stipends bumped up to around $1,000 in the second year), and I was lucky to be married and have a second income to help with the food bills. Still, we were fairly strapped for cash, and neither of  us had the time or energy to think about food prep. It was too easy to catch $1 burrito night at Senor Taco or split a pizza. I anesthetized myself with food during those months, and heavier foods meant that I would sleep fitfully but for a long time. It was also cheaper and less fussy (I thought) than preparing real meals.

My turning point happened in a dressing room in B. Moss at the Knoxville Center Mall. I had to buy a new pair of pants for a reading I was scheduled to give that weekend. Nothing else fit. And, as it happens, I had gotten too big to fit into the biggest of B. Moss pants. I had exceeded their definition of "largest size." What happened next is a blur of ice cream, nachos, and crying.

Here, I'm trying to tease apart two very different kinds of pain: the physical (the injury itself) and the emotional (feeling cumbersome and bloated, and then being "on display" three times a week teaching). 

I had to immediately adjust my home work space (a generous term for the couch) so that I didn't round my back while reading, typing, or grading. I followed what my PT called the 30/30/30 rule: Every 30 minutes, take 30 seconds and focus 30 yards away. A stability ball and pilates mat took up residence in the corner of my (creepy, dusty) office. I scheduled time to prepare food on Sunday nights: six chicken breasts, broccoli, one dozen boiled eggs, and baggies of portioned oatmeal.  And as much as I hate the company, I enrolled as a Sam's Club member. I could buy chicken and vegetables in bulk (and I often took friends with me so they could stock up).

Eating is a biological imperative, which is why I think it's so hard for people like me--people with troubled pasts with food--to reframe it. As I noted in this blog, I tend to be a teetotaler. All or nothing. I'll eat all the food, or I'll eat no food. I had to hedge this tendency, so I mixed two plans: IF (Intermittent Fasting) and grazing, via this plan. I still basically follow variations of both, and I find them to be flexible enough to fit into my life but firm enough to keep me from mindlessly consuming blocks of Velveeta. (Though in the last month, I've moved away from grazing, and I feel much better, so that part's in flux.)

Those who don't tote food or weight baggage are lucky. I do, though, and I had to find a sensible, sustainable way to fit food into my life, when so much of my life is spent sitting. (And with the uneven schedule most academics follow. It's never as clear as Monday-Friday, 9-5.) It sounds counter-intuitive to have a plan for eating, and I'm one of those people Pollan rails against in his books. Americans shouldn't require a plan in order to perform something so basic as eating, but with so many faux foods (and preposterous portions), I think it's an important discussion to have. And when your schedule and/or income seems to preclude fresh and healthy foods, I think it's even more important to talk about the care and feeding of the body.