There’s no singular “personal statement” required in the Vanderbilt Divinity School application.
However, there is a series of short essays that gives you a space to answer the questions a traditional personal statement would ask of you.
The application questions concern subjects such as your motivations in pursuing theological studies, the how and the what of that pursuit; your talents and background that shape your outlook; and what does embodying the Vanderbilt motto “Dare to Grow” mean to you?
(I, along with other current students, enjoyed the series of questions and found them unique to Vanderbilt Divinity School as well as reflective of the kind of community they’re trying to curate)
Thinking about the courage required for growth and who you are is a worthy and difficult exercise on its own. That said, there’s added pressure to articulate those answers when the audience is an admissions committee.
Writing is hard, and learning to communicate yourself accurately to others is a lifelong endeavor that requires the difficult work of regular introspection, so I’d like to offer some encouragement and reframing for approaching the page.
Firstly, when I taught writing courses and poetry at a university in New England, I’d advise my students against letting the blank page intimidate them. New writing students often fear the blank page is a mirror of themselves: that its emptiness reflects their own, and they’ve nothing to say.
As I assured them, and now you, this is not the case.
Instead, I’d encourage my students to think of the act of moving ideas in their head to the page as a freeway full of vehicles going from five lanes to one. Each car is an idea, or a word waiting to merge, uniformly, onto the page, one after another, one line at a time.
Patience is required in traffic, and there’s often stagnation between movements.
Secondly, no one ever said writing is easy, and that’s because communicating, in general, is difficult. I can’t even text my mother without her misusing an emoji, although she is improving.
The questions the essays ask you are ones worthy of a long reflection, but, like some of my favorite poets like to say, “first thought, best thought.”
If the blank page is starting to look like a mirror of desolation or feel like watching a traffic jam through a window, set a timer between five and fifteen minutes, and begin to write.
Don’t take your fingers away from the keyboard or writing utensil from the page; stay in motion, stay writing, for the full time you’ve set for yourself.
The exercise is meant to give yourself permission to externalize the complexities of your interiority, the reasons you want to be here at Vanderbilt Divinity School, the subjects you need to learn to help your community, the person you imagine becoming, and who you may help along the way.
Allowing yourself to free write like this widens the freeway, so to speak, and it’s important to remember that a “bad” draft will always be better than a “good” idea, so let it out.
Also, try writing by hand: it slows things down.
Thirdly, a great poetry teacher once told me there comes a time in every writer’s life where they make the great transition away from writing about themselves and start writing about others.
These essays are about you, but you can tell your story through the ways in which you have seen your purposes lived in your life, the effect your work has had. That’s what worked for me.
I’d advise against writing about how being the captain of your football team taught you about leadership; that’s self-evident, given the position.
Explain what you were able to accomplish together as a team and what it means to set others up for success. If you’ve never been the captain of a sports team, don’t worry: extrapolate the applicable personal experience: what are you called to do?
Additionally, you’ve a word count for these essays, so let your writing work in tandem with the rest of your application.
I worked for a time as a journalist, and instead of wasting space in my essays saying I could handle the academic workload in divinity school, I mentioned in my resume the volume of weekly articles I was responsible for producing.
Finally, I haven’t met you, dear reader (soon to be writer), but simply by virtue of your investigating the application process, I have tremendous faith that within you are cohesive worlds and words ready to be shared on the page and with the admissions committee.
The poet in me urges you to trust yourself, write the hard things, cry, laugh, stand ankle deep in water, and look up at the sky through the trees! Turn down the music on your ride home so you can hear what the world is saying to you and what you’re being called to do: it’ll help you find your way around the neighborhood of your heart.
Being a good writer starts with being a great listener, so give yourself space and pay attention, keep a notebook to catalogue the ideas that bubble forth from your day. You contain all your answers, and if you stay still enough, you’ll begin to see their shape in the fog.
If you have any questions, set up a meeting with the admissions office or send an email to divinity-admissions@vanderbilt.edu. They are more than happy to help and are so excited to read your work. Good luck navigating traffic!