Leading a session

Right before Thanksgiving break, I had a client who wanted me to look at her personal statement. She was applying to Wayne State to be a grad student and wanted to get into speech pathology. I'd never worked with personal statements before, and the client didn't give me anything very specific that she wanted to work on. As we read through the first page of her paper, (which was only two pages, the max length) I wondered what on earth I was going to talk to her about. She made only a few sentence-level errors (like inconsistent capitalization of Master's degree--kind of important in this context I think), but the only thing I really wished I could tell her was to develop some of her thoughts more. But, since her paper was already as long as it was allowed to be, that wasn't possible. Fortunately, I finally realized that her conclusion was really where we needed to work on things. It was short and glossed over her goals very briefly. As I started to talk to her about things I'd noticed, everything got much easier. It turns out she was confused about how exactly to say these things about herself that she wanted her audience to read. She knew what she wanted to say but felt she had worded it badly in her paper. So we had a discussion about the types of adjectives she'd used and if those were really the ones she wanted to include to describe herself (some were rather vague). We talked about whether it was important or not to say that she'd studied abroad (we concluded yes, it was). We re-read her paper and trimmed some of the superfluous bits in the beginning to make a little more room for her conclusion, and slowly both of us seemed to feel a lot better about what was getting done in this session. By the time we finished, I felt like I was reading a detailed, organized, well-written personal statement, and my client thanked me and told me I'd really helped her. I've heard that a few times before, but I'm always so glad to hear it.