Well, I’ve just had my first submission from a student who used ChatGPT. I’d helped her develop her personal statement, so I knew her writing ability. Now she’d submitted supplementals for me to look at. And the writing was so smooth I nearly slid right off it. Not one typo, not one split infinitive, phrases like “meaningful engagement” and “innovative learning environment” and “exchange of knowledge.” This was a student who’d been hazy on how to use commas.
Obviously, my answer for whether or not to use ChatGPT while writing your personal statements and supplementals is going to be a screaming, “No, don’t do it.” But it’s not necessarily for the reason that you think. Whether we like it or not, writing has changed now. Even my writer friends are coming face to face with it. One friend had an employee on his communications team who, he discovered, used Chatgpt for every single thing “she” wrote, including press releases, social media posts, blog posts. The employee, to be clear, was a communications major. I had another writer friend admit she’d used it herself for a pesky executive summary. Work she estimated would have taken her two hours was done in 20 minutes.
So, if even writers are using it, obviously this technology isn’t going away.
THE CHATGPT TRAP
But let me tell you what happens to your school application when your personal statement and other essays are written with it. Much of the heart that lives in the stories you have, stories that encapsulate who you are and that are worthy of the page, gets sucked out. So, in essence, you get a personal statement without a person. ChatGPT has many tell-tale signs, but the biggest is that the content it produces is hollow. In one of the supplementals I just read, the prompt asked the student to write about what community means to her. She opted to write about the community she’s part of at her job. But the essay was so generically written, if she hadn’t told me what the job was, I couldn’t have guessed. Sure, it talked about a break room, it talked about fellow employees sharing victories and stories together, it talked about co-workers feeling like family. It defined what community means (over and over again). But there wasn’t anything specific in there that actually made me think this person even had this job. Or that a real person occupied it.
In order to get ChatGPT to work better for you, you have to give it a lot of information. So if I tell it that I want to write a personal statement to get into med school, say, ChatGPT will tell me this: Please provide details such as the purpose of the statement (e.g., job application, college admission, etc.), your background, achievements, goals, and any specific qualities or experiences you’d like to highlight. The more details you provide, the more tailored and effective the statement can be.
In order to get this essay to be good, in other words, you have to dive deep into specifics. And it’s true — great personal statements rely on including details so you can paint pictures or set scenes that your reader can sink into. Take this wonderful piece from a student I had recently:
“Two years later, we were hustling toward the triage area. The hospital staff were parting for Dr. Han like cars for an ambulance. One of the technicians was kneeling over the patient on the bed, performing CPR.
‘Okay, guys, let’s be careful, yeah?’ Dr. Han was calm, stoic even. As the charge nurse relayed the patient’s story and history, he simultaneously gave out orders.
The patient, a large man in a small Grateful Dead T-shirt, was lifeless but his body continued to squirm from the powerful compressions. It was my first shift as an ED scribe. I had smelt burnt flesh from a welding accident, saw a child’s arm make an impossible shape, and heard a woman with dementia scream for five hours straight. But this was different.
After the shock set in, I began typing as fast as possible, missing key procedure notes that I would have to annoy Dr. Han about later.
I learned quickly that I am not a fast typer, a very unfortunate weakness for a scribe. After my shift, I sat in the mobile computer storage room, searching for some way to keep up. I found that I could use autocorrect suggestions as a shorthand system: I started with the basics: “Htn” became hypertension. Now, many months later ‘Patient with previous medical history of hypertension presents to the emergency department for evaluation of cough, fever, and chills’ is ‘pt wphx htn pred c, f, n ch.’”
CHATGPT NEEDS SO MANY DETAILS THAT …
Imagine providing all of this detail so ChatGPT could assemble your story for you. Even if you only provided sentence fragments, you’d already have started writing your own statement. You’d already be doing the work, it would be yours and, most importantly, it would sound like you. One of the great benefits of a school application that asks for a personal statement is it is giving you the opportunity to speak. It’s giving your admissions officer the opportunity to hear you in your writing. But using technology to complete that assignment means you’ve taken that opportunity away from yourself.
Look, I know writing this stuff isn’t fun; students just aren’t taught how to write in a personal way. I also know that, at one point or another, you’re going to use ChatGPT. But starting the next step in your academic career by using technology that many colleges and universities consider a form a cheating is not how you want to launch yourself. You can tell yourself that almost everyone uses it, but you know what? Not everyone does. There is gorgeous writing that students produce on their own once they have been pushed in the right direction. And those are the students you’re up against.