Yay! and Oh no!

[aicha]

I successfully handed both essays in on time--yay! Apologies to everyone who had to listen to me moan endlessly about them, and also thank you for doing so. It seems to be my default reaction to essays (along with panicking and doubting my self-worth), but talking through my stresses with people really helps to calm me down and put things in

Comments

[m00nface]

Hey, don't worry about the personal statement having an effect on your entrance to the university! The things it may possibly have a theoretical slight influence on are:

1. Scholarship possibilities
2. Re-placing you in classes

Still not something to worry too much about, because while there is a chance they will take personal statements into account when sorting out scholarship distribution, there is also every chance that it's entirely political and they've already decided which students they'll give money to, as I think it almost certainly was in my case (it DEFINITELY had nothing to do with my extremly poor grades!).

As for the classes, they will give you a placement test, so your personal statement has absolutely nothing to do with which class you get put in originally, but while at most universities the system is absolutely rigid and changing the class you were placed in is bureaucratically impossible, at Kindai the teachers took a bunch of other things into consideration, including my (very enthusiastic) personal request to be moved, how well I was able to communicate with the teacher, how well I could read parts of the textbook they showed me at random, AND my original personal statement. It wasn't enough on its own, and probably wouldn't have hurt my chances had it been in English, but it gave me a little bit of a foothold that it was in Japanese.

Do you have a Japanese friend who can go over the statement once you've written it and make it perfect? It's what I did, and really reduced the pressure on the quality of work I had to produce upfront. Failing that, my sakubun have got half-decent since coming here, so if you'd like me to look over it and get Taku to double-check it, I'd be more than happy to help out! Try to shake off this particular worry, because it's definitely the kind of situation where relaxing will help you to get it done.

Oh, and the year abroad project? XD I'm in the middle of it right now, really, REALLY don't pay too much attention to it, I'm sure my proposal was a fortnight late! : ) Just relax, focus on the statement that does need to be done, try and get something rough on paper even if you hate it, then employ a Japanese person or myself to go through it. I know it's cutting it quite fine since today is Thursday, but the timezones are so far apart that if you're still up now I may still be able to help out! I've just woken up, I'll be here for a while yet.

[aicha]

Thank you for your comment! :) It does make the personal statement feel like slightly less of a big deal, looking objectively at how it is actually likely to affect me in the future. The most important thing is to just have a personal statement to use, I suppose, so I'll just have to get over the pressure I'm putting on myself by wanting it to be good, and focus on just getting something down! I'm fairly certain they wouldn't appreciate me failing to include one at all :P.

Thank you also for offering to look over it for me. If I reach a point of having something vaguely coherent (ie more than 5 half-sentences) anytime soon and you're still about, I may take you up on that (if I can get over my embarrassment about how bad it is)! However, at the moment I'm very much at the stage of 'I can't do this', and I'm not sure I'll be able to produce anything to read, so we'll see...I guess it really would help to relax at this point, actually! ^^;

[m00nface]

The personal statement genuinely has nothing to do with whether you go to a university or not. It's all a formality, and maybe to give them some idea of which class you might go in, or of what point of view you'll be approaching classes with, etc. Even if it isn't perfect, they're accepting you in order to teach you Japanese, so they're not expecting you to know everything already! Even if you do provide a perfect statement, they also know full well that it's not a reflection of your actual ability - the first (and last) thing my teachers said to me about it was, "Your personal statement was very impressive... I assume you had Japanese friends help you with it, yes?" XD Don't worry about it, it has pretty much no bearing on anything, you'll feel better once you have something on paper, even if it's only a rough outline for you to fill in the details a little later after a break or something.

Don't worry about feeling like you're not able to write it, I can guarantee there will be applicants with a level of Japanese much lower than yours, and if they require personal statements to be in Japanese then you've already got the advantage. If it's worrying you that much, keep it short and sweet and take it to one of the Japanese teachers tomorrow, ask if somebody can look through it quickly. They did that for mine, got it marked within an hour or so, and it made a lot of difference to have something with red pen scrawled on it to copy up.

Do you use MSN? If so, my contact is akaiciel [at] hotmail [dot] com. Ping me if you want me to look at anything, okay? Also ping if you'd like any advice on how to go about just getting started, or advice on the move, as it were! I just finished a sakubun class, and I always got good marks for structure and such, if you'd like to run stuff by someone as you think of it, I'm more than happy to help, I'm at the computer anyway. Either way, good luck! You'll be fine once you shake out some of the tension and fill up some lines of paper. : )