Personal Statements

NEW YORK, N.Y.—Last week, as Bronx native Sonia Sotomayor testified before the Senate and President Barack H. Obama visited New York to commemorate the centennial of the NAACP, I sat on the Lower East Side, a neighborhood that has been home to immigrants for generations. I work at Henry Street Settlement, founded by Lillian Wald, an early supporter of the NAACP. She hosted the informal reception that kicked off the 1909 National Negro Conference that helped launch the century-old organization. In a stuffy office across from housing projects, I read drafts of college essays written by New York high school students, including many by poor immigrants. I remembered Sotomayor’s controversial statement—“a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life”—and wondered: What creates wisdom?

My own personal statement demonstrated a commitment to an extracurricular activity, and ended on a cheery note about personal growth. The students I work with at Henry Street have many ideas about what makes a college essay, and they are usually less comfortable. One of them, P, who came here with his brothers from Panama just two years ago, wrote about his parents’ divorce and his abandonment by his mother. P and many of his peers have never written about their tumultuous personal lives before. Their essays serve many functions that mine didn’t: venting, confiding, and forgiving.

P’s emotional depth does not get in the way of his writing style. His recently acquired English is textured like Nabokov’s, and he likes to prick the imagination with unexpected words and fantastic metaphors. His transition from Spanish to English has improbably recreated the early twentieth-century’s revolution in consciousness—he writes unpunctuated streams to rival James Joyce. When I teach him grammar, I provide dashes and colons to preserve his extraordinary phrasing.

Though he is only 17, P possesses uncommon ambition and resilience. He has come by my door, smiling, every day for the past two weeks—but his SAT scores are low enough that many colleges will not even bother to consider his vivacious essays. Fortunately, P lives here in New York City, so he has two attractive options. The City University of New York runs a strong and vast network of community and four-year colleges, which cost in-state families less than $5,000 a year. And if P’s academic performance and income fall within state standards, he may qualify for financial aid and support services from the State University of New York’s Educational Opportunity Program or its siblings at CUNY and New York’s private colleges. These programs ask students like P to write about the hardships they have endured. Their difficult experiences become their qualifications for acceptance. The implication is that these resilient students, perhaps like Judge Sotomayor, have something important to share—because of race, poverty, and even plain adversity. I wonder: How can one compare the wisdom granted by different kinds of hardships? I also wonder about the opportunities available to poor high school students who live outside of New York City. Do they have the chance to attend affordable colleges, and write about their inner selves?

I imagine that if his teachers had encouraged him to write about his painful private life, P would now be even more at home in his lucid streams of consciousness.


Alex M. McLeese ’11, a Crimson news writer, is a history concentrator in Cabot House.