Once you've chosen your topic, it's

time to shape your story, and by

shaping your story, I mean planning

out your essay, loosely outlining it.

The big question is, what

did you learn about yourself?

The answer to that

question is your end game.

It's what you're always writing towards.

Now, it seems like the

answer should be obvious.

Don't you know what you

learned about yourself?

Well, actually, you often don't.

Remember that stories are artificial.

Real life does not unfold in

perfect little units of epiphany.

Now, occasionally, something happens and

we realize that we're learning a life

lesson as it happens, but more often,

you figure out those big life lessons

in retrospect, a little bit at a time.

Sometimes you can't even articulate

what you learned until you try

to write about it, and sometimes

it takes more than one draft.

Once you figure out the lesson, though,

you can really crack open your essay.

Every personal statement is a pyramid.

Your story is built on events, moments,

scenes, anecdotes, things that you did,

things that happened to you, but it's

not enough just to relate the events.

You have to add emotions.

You have to tell us what's at stake.

You have to make us

care about the story.

I edited an essay of a student who

worked as a sustainability manager at

a company in India, and in her essay,

she talked about how she went from

facility to facility, she assessed

health risks to workers, she assessed

ways to save energy, she gave her

report to management, and they shrugged.

And the essay was well written and

it made her look competent, but

at the end of the day, I didn't

know why I was reading this story.

She presented it with very few emotions.

It read almost like

an executive summary.

If you want buy-in from your readers,

you have to show your own buy-in.

We'll invest emotion

if we see your emotion.

So in the second draft, we made

her react to all these events.

We tried to convey her frustration,

even her despair, as she encountered

the apathy of the executives.

And we tried to show her triumph and her

deep, deep satisfaction when she finally

did manage to implement her suggestions.

Finally, on top of the events,

on top of the emotions, you cap

your essay off with the lesson.

This is why you're telling the story.

This is what you learned.

Now, you can build your essay from

the bottom up or the top down.

I think it's usually easier to

build it from the bottom up.

In that case, you usually

start with an event.

You know you want to write about

something, even if you don't

quite know yet what you learned.

So you write your event, you piece

together your story, you react to

it, and then, when you've got it all

written down, you figure out the lesson.

How did you change,

or what did you learn?

But if you don't have an event,

you don't know what you want

to start with, you can build

your essay from the top down.

So sometimes you'll start with a lesson.

More often, you'll just start

with a broad topic, like my

background, and then you try to

fill it out with specific events.

You try to name those anecdotes,

those moments, those scenes

that you will eventually shape

into the base of your story.

Every essay has to answer

three questions: What happened?

How did it make you feel?

And what did you learn?

Now, these three questions

correspond to the pyramid.

So what happened?

Well, those are your events.

How did it make you feel?

Those are your emotions.

What did you learn?

That's the lesson.