Letters of recommendation are a standard part of any graduate school application. Yet, students receive little guidance in acquiring them. They don’t identify effective writers. They ask for letters too late in the process. They don’t provide enough information to help letter writers compose strong letters. This is especially true for historically under-represented college students — students of color and first generation college students — for whom the ways of college and graduate school can seem mysterious and impenetrable.

When I began to be asked to write for students, I got tired of typing the same email response and created A Guide for Requesting Letters of Recommendation. …

This is the time of year university professors field requests from students for letter of recommendation to graduate and other professional schools. Application deadlines typically fall between November 15th and January 15th and I start getting requests in October. Writing such letters is a pain but most professors don’t mind. We wouldn’t be where we are if professors hadn’t written for us. And we enjoy helping students succeed. So we write.

Grad school applications usually require a personal statement of some kind and students seem to really struggle with these. Over the years I’ve seen the same problems many times and offer this advice for writing a strong personal statement that avoids major pitfalls and improves your chances of acceptance to graduate school. …

🎓 This is the second half a two-part story about writing a personal statement as part of a graduate school application. Read Part One here. Read about requesting letters of recommendation (to support your grad school application) here.

You’ve done identified a handful of likely graduate programs, conducted some thorough research, and are ready to start writing. See Part One for how to use the application questions as a guide to structure your personal statement. But how to start the whole thing off?

That horrible first sentence

I’m going to let you in on a little secret: everybody, even those who write for a living, hate writing the first sentence. Everyone! Remember: you’re going to revise and edit your statement (hopefully a lot!) before you send it. The first sentence is just a draft to get your writing muscles warmed up. If you plan to purge it during editing, writing the first sentence gets a lot easier. The first sentence is trash. Write it. …

I’ve been listening to the Senate hearings for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett mostly via NPR so haven’t focused too closely on the visuals. But I’ve seen the images posted to news sites and social media.

I’ve been struck by the similarity in Barrett’s attire at all her public events: solid-colored dresses usually cut below the knee, with fitted bodices and shoulders, tailored waists, and a near-absence of decoration or ornament except for minimal elements in the same fabric as the dress. All with no or unobtrusive jewelry and neutral low heels. And pearls. Lots of pearls. …

My ears perked up earlier this week when I saw social media posts about Halle Berry’s Instagram interview where she discussed playing a transman in an upcoming film. Like many others, I cringed when I read some of her words:

I want to experience that world, understand that world. I want to deep dive in that in the way I did Bruised. Who this woman was is so interesting to me, and that will probably be my next project, and that will require me cutting all of my hair off…. That’s what I want to experience and understand and study and explore… it’s really important to me to tell stories, and that’s a woman, that’s a female story — it changes to a man, but I want to understand the why and how of that. …

Or, we could imagine forms of sport that don't just cater to the physical extremes of one kind of body. (Radical, I know!) Sports weren't handed down by Zeus from Mt. Olympus on stone tablets. We invented them and we can invent different ones that are more equitable and inclusive.

A few nights ago, I was woken at 3:30 a.m. by the sound of a bookshelf giving way, spilling a couple dozen LGBTQ+ history books onto the floor of my home office. Some date from the earliest years of the gay and lesbian rights movement. Others are more recent, but treasured, works that have profoundly shaped my thinking over the years. Groggily viewing the floor strewn with these books, I was both irritated and sad. It’s not my preferred way to wake from a deep sleep and I hoped none had been damaged in their ‘graceless concession to gravity.’

The noisy descent of my history books is an apt metaphor for all those inaccurate social media posts I’ve been seeing about Stonewall, the first Pride parades, and the origins of the LGBTQ+ rights movement. This is the time of year I have to repress the urge to correct every Tweet and Facebook post having some variation of “Marsha P. Johnson ‘threw the first brick’ at Stonewall.” Or, “Sylvia Rivera lead the Stonewall riots.” Or, the entirety of the modern LGBTQ rights movement is owed to Black and Brown trans people. A sample from the last few days on…

It’s that time of year again when LGBTQs (and rainbow capitalists) trot out the the rainbow Pride flags to celebrate Pride Month. And with that ritual comes the perennial debate about the proper way to display the Pride flag: red stripe on top? Or bottom?

This year, we need to fly the rainbow Pride flag upside down. To signal our national distress.

The first rainbow Pride flags were hand-dyed and sewn of cotton muslin by Lynn Segerblom, James McNamara, Gilbert Baker and other volunteers in San Francisco in 1978. They were first flown over the city’s Civic Center Plaza and United Nations Plaza on June 25, 1978 for the city’s Gay Freedom Day Parade. Earlier that year Harvey Milk had been elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the Gay Freedom Day planning committee knew all eyes would be on the city as it celebrated the 10 years since the Stonewall Uprising. …