![[Will Shan 1.opus]] ![[Will Shan 2.opus]] ![[Will Shan 3.opus]] ![[Will Shan 4.opus]] ## Introduction and Overall Approach Hi, Jimmy. Thank you for your thoughtfulness and your consideration. No worries at all. I'm very happy to support you and also very happy to write you a recommendation letter because I believe in you. As I told you two years ago, sitting on the steps of Outward Bound Vietnam, I am genuinely so excited to see your growth, your flourishing, to support you along your journey. I just left a bunch of comments on the Google Doc that you shared with me. The first thing I'm going to say before you even look at those comments is that take all of these with a grain of salt. I know that writing a personal statement can feel like such a personal and even vulnerable process and I want to invite you to, yeah, really treat all of my comments as invitations for reflection and not, you know, not like I just took a red marker to drastically change your beautiful work or anything like that. It's not corrective, they're suggestive, maybe is one way to say that. Yeah, I really, really enjoyed reading your personal statement and I really think it speaks to who you are and who I at least I understand you to be. I left a bunch of comments that are primarily about framing and wording and how you might better show not tell your story, so using different vivid imagery or more clear language. So there's a lot of comments that are focused on that. I'm not going to touch on that in the voice memo, rather I want to kind of zoom out and give you some bigger picture feedback for consideration. ## Main Feedback: Balancing Philosophy with Personal Story The first feedback for you is I have a sense that you are somebody who likes to think at a philosophical or idealistic level and at the same time, I would encourage you to think about ==in your essay, where do you bring in elements of yourself, your personality, not just your thoughts, but your story, your being. == And I say that because the draft of the essay that you shared with me feels very much like a treatise, kind of a long form essay published on a blog. And not so much actually like a personal statement that is ==a mirror for you, your journey, your story, your hopes, your longing==. And I think there could be a little bit more about that. Yeah, for example, what kind of school did you go to when you were at when COVID happened? What is your kind of positionality in relation to school? And what drove you to visit alternative education communities, even almost dropping out or changing schools, which I would mention, by the way, it shows a certain level of initiative and independent thinking. So that's I think my biggest point of feedback for you is try to ==weave in more of your essence==. ## Additional Considerations Yeah, I would say two other notes, which are smaller, but still ambiguous. So I didn't know exactly how to give them on the document. So I'm going to just verbally share them with you. ### Acknowledging Privilege The first is that COVID is something that of course impacted people very differently depending on who they were. And I think that at some point, you know, you do a good job of already acknowledging that education is a privilege. But I would also maybe more explicitly at some point, you know, name that even having the ability to, you know, retreat from school during COVID, not be on the front line to not have to still have conditions which you could self learn that that too is a privilege and that that too is connected to, you know, education being a privilege. So I would just make that connection more clear. ### Reframing the AI Discussion And the second is I'm going to guess that ==especially people applying to Stanford, a lot of them are going to mention AI. A lot of them are going to have this kind of entrepreneurial streak==. I would invite you to think about how you could frame your project. Yes, you can mention AI, but in some ways, just mentioning AI may not be enough. I would encourage you to think less about using, you know, starting with AI, you know, and framing it that way, but rather just ==framing it as it is this system that will help anybody learn and consolidate their knowledge and synthesize it==. And of course, yeah, integrates the latest technology like AI. But I would yeah, I would basically reframe so the anchor is not on like agentic AI, or even on, you know, the note taking and thinking workspace, but ==connect us to the broader ideal here==. Yeah, so that's that's that's my my feedback for you. And I'm going to leave you one more voice memo or the framework that maybe could help you as you think about your essay. ## Framework: Concentric Circles of Meaning A framework I want to share is this idea of concentric circles of meaning which actually was shared with me by somebody who guided me through my college application essay writing process. ### The Four Circles And I just want to invite you to invite to imagine three circles, maybe even four. And they're concentric, so they're like within each other. The smallest circle is the self. The second circle is the community. Third circle is society or the world. And perhaps the fourth circle is our planet. ### How to Use This Framework And I think the best essays are ones that help us feel at different levels of this circle, why it is meaningful, why it is connecting. So just having a circle that stays at the self level doesn't really, you know, doesn't really pull on our emotions, feel compelling. At the same time, having an essay that's entirely about societal impact or planetary impact feels not human, feels not grounded in someone's real lived experience, feels not connecting because the emotion is connecting. ==I think the strongest essays are ones that weave all these circles together, usually beginning at the self and then zooming out and at some point being able to touch on the third or the fourth ring, the third or the fourth circle. == ### Applying It to Your Essay So I just want to encourage you to think about that. How can you weave in all dimensions of this circle? Right now it feels a lot at the third circle of society. ==I would encourage you to share more stories, more anecdotes, more visuals, more moments that are easy to imagine, easy to picture of yourself, of your friend, a specific friend or a specific self-directed learner or a specific teacher perhaps== to try and bring that into your essay. I know that the essays do in just about a week. So again, take all of these as an invitation and just submit in the end something that you feel is authentic to you and feels good to you. These are just some perspectives from an outsider to me and I hope that they're helpful. All right, sounds great. ## Recommendation Letter Strategy Lastly, moving away from your essay now and more about your recommendation letter, often it can be helpful, strategic even, for the recommendation letter to ==either touch on an aspect of your being that you didn't get a chance to properly share in your essays, or to strengthen and give credibility to a aspect that is already in your application. == So I actually wanted to ask you, are there things you would like questions you would give me as I think about what to write for your recommendation letter, maybe suggestions on stories or directions you think you would like this recommendation letter. Yeah, I would love to hear if you have any initial ideas, if not, that's okay, I'll just write from the heart and write from what I know. But sometimes it's helpful to make sure that these different components of your application feel like they bounce off each other, they reflect each other, they integrate and weave together. So yeah, let me know. And I'll leave one last voice memo, which is already what I'm thinking about, including in your recommendation letter. ## Planned Themes for Recommendation Letter So, in your recommendation letter, here's what I've already kind of begun to think about. I haven't started writing it yet, but just so you know kind of what feels true to me and what I feel like I can really speak about. ### Theme 1: Critical Thinking and Questioning Assumptions I absolutely think I'm going to bring in this anecdote of you at doing good after we had done the community mapping exercise and you kind of having that mic drop moment of, do these problems that we just came up with actually exist or are we just projecting or are we just kind of falling into the savior complex? Definitely going to weave in that story because I think it reflects your thoughtfulness and your ability to see the water you're swimming in question assumptions and not take anything to be granted. ### Theme 2: Self-Directed Learning The second thing I want to highlight is of course what you and I have talked about many many times, which is this clear sense that you are a self-directed learner, somebody who knows that school is not education, education is life, learning is life. You know the kind of person that's constantly recording things on your Apple Watch voice recordings to then synthesize later to then share, which is I think the most beautiful part of it all. So that theme of course you're writing about in your personal statement, I am going to absolutely highlight that as well. ### Closing Thoughts And yeah, those are the kind of the two themes I feel come to mind for me and I would be curious to hear if you have any other stories you'd like to share with me or any other examples of either of these two themes. Okay, cool, I hope this is helpful. I hope it also comes not too late and I look forward to supporting you however you think I can. Okay, bye-bye.