The first thing I do when I evaluate a candidate for graduate school is look at their transcript.
I know, this is a blog entry on writing a personal statement - bear with me. I'll get there.
OK. Grades. Grades matter. I'm sorry. They do. And the number of courses you take S/NC matter. Take 1 or 2 here and there, it's fine. You can even take some in your concentration. That's fine too. But half your classes? Or more? I will admit that I would find that problematic in my evaluations of candidates.
Again, let me state for the record that I do not represent the opinion of Brown University or the CLPS department. I represent myself. So, to be clear: I, David Sobel, personally would look with disfavor on a student applying to work with me for graduate school who took half or more of their classes S/NC (with the exception of students at schools where S/NC was required, like Hampshire College)
The second thing that I look at is the personal statement.
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So, what do I look at when I read a personal statement? I look for the student's research identity. Can the applicant clearly talk about what they have worked on and the projects and experiences they have? Can they clearly articulate what they want to do for the next few years - what questions they want to ask and answer (not just a single project, but a topic - a set of investigations)? Can they clearly describe why they are a match for me and my research interests as well as my department? Can they clearly demonstrate why they would be a successful graduate student with a clear set of goals?
(by the way, if the "clearly"s didn't explain what I really value, then you should reread that paragraph)
But I also look for one other thing. If there are poor grades on the transcript - a set of C's in some classes, or low B-level grades in some classes (like stats or psychology classes), I look for an explanation. Grades are important overall, but one semester - or one situational set of events - should not affect a student's future. The question is whether the applicant addresses it in a satisfactory manner.
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I struggled my first year at college. It wasn't with STEM classes - it was with the humanities. I was lucky that Swarthmore (where I went as an undergraduate) required that all students take their first semester S/NC. I took a Linguistics class (intro), and got a low B in it. I took an English class (also a low B). I took Intro Psychology (probably an A-) and Intro Computer Science (the only class I was pretty sure I got an A in). In my second semester, I took a math class (A-), another Linguistics class (B), a course in clinical psychology (B) and an advanced English class ( where I got a C, and I will be honest, that was a complete and utter gift of a grade).
If you're scoring at home, that's a 2.93 GPA after a year of college (I graduated with a 3.4, so things improved). Swarthmore College - anywhere else it would have been an A. (They put that on the t-shirts).
I was always surprised that I was admitted to graduate school, but I think one of the things that helped was that I had a rough time transferring to college. I wasn't a first-generation college student (my mother had gone to college), but I was the first in my family to ever leave home (I'm from New York City, and no one in my immediate family had ever left NY to go to college - the expectation was that I would go to a CUNY or SUNY school, or if I was really smart, Columbia). So, moving to (outside) Philadelphia for college was unheard of. On top of that, my father had passed away (a few years before), but it was a difficult transition for my family - so I had to go home a lot of weekends, particularly in the first semester. It was a challenging time.
I had the insight to talk about this fact when I wrote my graduate admission essay. I talked about how my transition to college was challenging, and how the way I performed later in college was more representative of my intellectual ability than how I performed in my first year. And this was particularly true for classes in my majors (Psychology and Computer Science), than classes in fields where I was more exploratory (English, Linguistics, and the semester of Latin that I took in college for reasons I still don't understand).
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So, this post is a perfect example of reasoning by anecdote. I'm giving you advice based on my own experiences, and nothing more. Personal statements should be just that: Personal. Talk about yourself and who you are. If you came to Brown and originally struggled with grades, that's OK. Talk about it. But critically, you want to talk about how your struggles made you a better student and a better person. How your struggles made you better qualified to succeed in the future. And again, you want to talk the HOW - not just that you struggled with a particular class, but how it was a struggle for you and what you learned from it. And when you do this, show some insight into yourself. You don't need to explain a single bad grade (Plese repeat after me: A B is not a bad grade. It's OK to get a B). But if you have a large number of B and C-level grades, it's important to explain why, and more importantly, where you stand now.