By Iris Cushing
A student whom I’ll call “Franklin” first made an appointment with me in September of this past year, with the goal of drafting and polishing a statement for a transfer application from Baruch to another university. The statement is due right about now—almost six months from when he began working on it.
During our first session, it became clear that he wanted his statement to be as good as it could possibly be, and that he was willing to work hard to make that happen. He started on it so early because he wanted to have a lot of room for brainstorming, trial and error, and research. Franklin wanted his statement to strike that perfect balance between demonstrating what he knows and what he wants to do with that knowledge, and demonstrating who he is.
Our first session was full of insight and excitement, and I was delighted to see Franklin come back the next week, and the next, and the next.
Any kind of statement for an application presents a host of unique challenges for writer and consultant. The statements usually have a strict word limit, yet ask broad and complex questions that most people would have an easier time answering over the course of many pages. One of my and Franklin’s first tasks was to accept the fact that much of what he wrote would eventually be edited out—the statement had a 650-word limit. An initial challenge that arose was letting go of the notion that he could just sit down and write it out all perfectly in one go. He wasn’t that kind of writer (who is?) and, moreover, the process of writing a lot and then culling from that body of work taught us both a lot about what was important to him and how to skillfully weave it all together. How does what remains reflect everything that was cut?
Because we had so many sessions to craft such a small piece of writing, keeping focused was a challenge. It was dangerously easy to spend a lot of time looking at articles on the internet, obsessing over the website for the program he wants to transfer to, and the like. Franklin, like most of us, is a busy guy, and often didn’t have time to work on his statement in between sessions. As the months passed, we developed a system wherein at least half of our session-time together would be spent with him just writing quietly. An important part of our collaboration was the mutual facilitation of this time. The weekly hour created a kind of pressure-cooker for Franklin’s drafting and revising of his statement: each 30 or 40-minute block of writing, framed at the start with goals and ending on a discussion about progress, gave him a chance to make contact with the high stakes of the project without feeling like he had to figure it out all at once.
Toward the end of our months of refining his statement, our sessions became purely about fine-tuning the sentences and phrases within the statement, to make it as clear and memorable as possible. I think we both felt that the statement was not only a functional, necessary piece of writing, but something we had both grown from as a writer/consultant. That depth, the sense of a journey with a small text, is something I think can only happen over time.
Published March 9, 2015
