Personal Statements in University Entry (Aclits Seminar 2006)

Academic literacies seminar, June 30 2006, University of Westminster.

Writing in the Space Provided: the Personal Statement and School/University Transition

Summary

This presentation looks at the UCAS personal statement and its role in the transition from secondary school to university.

Most students applying for a university place through the UCAS system in the UK have to write a 'personal statement'. This text, part of an application form which includes predicted grades and teacher references, plays a significant role in the transition from school to university, especially in situations where university places are competitive or where candidates are considered 'borderline'. The genre of the personal statement contributes to the management and regulation of a system of academic placement and selection.

For many students the personal statement is their first experience of constructing and projecting an academic identity to an audience outside the context of school. As a ‘genred space’ (Bawarshi), the personal statement, though initially appearing to be a neutral invitation to present personal experience and motivation, is an obligation to write about the self which places students in a national system of selection and placement. The genre is a ‘space provided’; students have to work out what ‘they’ – meaning universities – are ‘looking for’ to make the most of that space and get accepted for university. To adopt Bartholomae’s celebrated phrase about academic writing, students have to ‘invent the university’, whilst at the same time keeping their writing ‘personal’.

This presentation reports on some students in an international school in Amsterdam who successfully applied for places at universities in the UK. I focus today on the role of revision in the writing process. Using Bakhtinian notions of ‘re-accentuation’ and ‘re-contextualisation’, I consider how students’ wording of self-presentation changed as their understanding of the genre of the personal statement became progressively more informed, strategic and responsive.

Far from being a ‘personal’ matter, writing the personal statement engages the writer with a range of ‘other voices’ – peers, teachers, parents, university prospectuses – which dialogise the writing process over time and make the genre ‘transactable’ in an individual way. Students gradually learn how to construct a ‘voice’ and an agency of their own – and a threshold academic identity – by absorbing and responding to these other voices. Effective wordings of motivation and experience are socially produced.

I outline in the presentation an approach to revision which stresses social and interactive features as well as identity in the making of a written text. I will try to describe the concept of auditioning which I am employing to understand this process of revision – a process which is always more than words. I also appeal for more discussion of this relatively neglected but high stakes genre of transition, and suggest that it is relevant to debates and research on ‘academic writing’.

The genre of the personal statement is couched in a the bigger picture, the activity system, of university selection and school/university transition. Can more explicit and visible teaching of the personal statement, as both text and institutional practice, help students to negotiate the school/university transition more easily, and perhaps make the process of constructing a threshold academic identity a less isolated affair?

For references and links see my bibliographies site at http://robsresearchbibs.blogspot.com/

For more on the UCAS personal statement see the site set up by Helen Martin and myself which is aimed at college-bound students: http://personalstatement.blogspot.com/