Why I Want to Go to Graduate School: an essay written under the threat of a failed future

An antiquated form of torture picked by upper level education to see how well a student can sum up all of their creative dreams and aspirations in 500 words or less. A deterrent almost successful enough to prevent potential students from applying for advanced degrees. The university "Personal Statement" must be one of the most poorly written documents submitted to establishments of higher learning... here is a draft at mine.

Personal Statement


It takes the precise and rapid firing of nearly 7.4 trillion synapses for my human brain to create a sentence. It’s as if my brain were the master of multiple choice tests, and in a single instance could answer infinite numbers of yes or no questions of which the resulting information could be the most brilliant sentence ever written. If a single synapse misfires, and answers no instead of yes, or yes instead of no, my moment of staggering genius could be instantly transformed into an annoying hour of humming the Oscar Myer Theme Song. Our senses are so heavily inculcated with accessible information that creativity becomes an improbability.

Against the odds, I am a creative being. It eases my nerves a bit to realize that, statistically, my chances of being accepted into your M.F.A. program are far greater than my odds of ever completing a full-length play. Having completed the play I feel I can breathe a sigh of relief where this graduate school thing is concerned.

I am both writer and researcher. Instead of letting potential distractions appear daunting I seek them out. I am not hiding from the information of this world, but utilizing it as an immense quantity of inspiration. Think of me as a notebook in the pocket, walking across the desert, reading antique postcards kind of writer. To be fruitful I must interact with the world. Inside my highly organized brain knowledge is not clutter, but an awe inspiring- albeit daunting-amount of power. Information is one of my greatest resources, it provides me with a context for creativity. One of the most well recognized symbols of eastern philosophy is the Yin Yang- a circle defined by its contrast. That is how I approach writing. I am in the context of this world, and it is in the context of me.

Walking down a boardwalk on a small southeast Alaskan island I heard a faint popping sound. My imagination conjured the picture of an army of tiny gremlins popping bubble wrap, but when I looked closely at my surroundings I saw something much more real and equally as interesting. Thousands of tiny barnacles were being thrust upward with the falling tide, and in a life or death attempt to protect their moist bodies from the elements the barnacles were forcing any errant air through their calciferous exoskeletons. The process makes a small popping sound. In these details I discovered a story about an anxious barnacle and a suicidal flounder. It's the project I am most currently working on.

My goal as a writer is to gather up the information and use it to tell stories. To take the intricacies of history, science, anthropology, behavior; the intricacies of life, and weave them into the movements of characters, the nuances of a setting, the eccentricities of language. I want to take what this life has to offer me, and I want to create worlds.