Personal Statement
In many ways, writing a personal statement is a 180-degree turn from what you’re used to doing in school or college. You have been trained to write rather staid, formal, academic papers in which you know the format and what is expected of you, and the challenge lies in researching the topic at hand.
What is a personal statement?
A personal statement is..
• Your introduction to the committee.
• The heart of your application, which is your ticket to an interview, where the scholarship, admission or fellowship will be decided.
• A picture of you.
• An invitation to get to know you.
• An indication of your priorities.
• Your story.
• A serious examination of the intellectual and personal experiences that have motivated you to participate in this process and to pursue the particular project you are proposing in your application, and the ways in which your intellectual and personal experience since entering college have informed your choices.
• Your introduction to the committee.
• The heart of your application, which is your ticket to an interview, where the scholarship, admission or fellowship will be decided.
• A picture of you.
• An invitation to get to know you.
• An indication of your priorities.
• Your story.
• A serious examination of the intellectual and personal experiences that have motivated you to participate in this process and to pursue the particular project you are proposing in your application, and the ways in which your intellectual and personal experience since entering college have informed your choices.
In the end, the personal statement should provoke the thought in reader’s mind that “I’d like to meet this person". A really effective personal statement tells the reader what makes you different from everyone else in the applicant pool, and does so while utilizing engaging, interesting, and concise prose.
In general, remember that this is about listening to your gut, not letting your head talk. You have to find ways to turn off the logical, academic, editing part of your brain and tune in to your gut. Do this by engaging in mindless, repetitive activities that allow your mind to wander away, like doing dishes, jogging, or driving on a long, straight, uncrowned interstate. Or try writing first thing in the morning, everyday, before your brain has a chance to really wake up and kick in. Listen for the small voice inside that really knows you best. Then, start writing. Here are three plans of attack to begin writing your personal statement:
1) Brainstorm / Free write / organize. Just sit down and just start writing about yourself. Don’t edit anything out. Just let everything about you spill out on the page. Then pick a bunch of the most promising-looking ideas and give yourself five minutes to free write on each of those topics to see which ones you can tease the most out of. Lastly, start organizing them: which ones fit together the best? How can you make sense of these disparate parts? Make a schematic, organizational, or flow chart that shows the relationship between them.
2) Make a timeline of your life. What three or five or ten events would someone have to know to understand you? How do they connect to one another?
3) Write short answers to a bunch of the following questions. Keep track of which ideas keep popping up, and when you seem to be repeating yourself. Limit yourself to one or two paragraphs so that you can answer as many of these as possible.
- What experiences do you like talking about the most? What has been the most?
- Interesting, intriguing, and exciting part of your life – why, and what did you learn from it?
- Discuss an activity or experience that has helped you to clarify your long-term academic goals.
- Name a class or internship that you have taken to develop expertise in your major field of study.
- Describe a person who has shaped your values or beliefs.
- In five years, where do you see yourself working and what do you envision yourself?
- Discuss a need of society that you hope to address in your career Use statistics and other published resources to document the magnitude of the problem.
- Describe your hometown and explain its impact on your beliefs or values.
- Discuss an obstacle that you’ve had to overcome to achieve your academic goals.
- Write me a letter, and tell me everything you do, your personal history, and what matters to you.
- What do you enjoy doing?
- What ideas, books, theories, or movements have made a profound impact on you? Be honest and don’t try to impress anyone.
- Where or how do you seem to waste the most time?
- How are you a typical product of your generation and culture? In what ways do you deviate from the norm?
- Which famous person (alive or dead; real or imagined) do you most identify with, and why?
- What errors or mistakes have you made that have taught you something about yourself?
- What is something you haven’t tried yet, but want to? What is keeping you from trying this?
- Of which decision or accomplishment in your life are you the most proud?
- What do you wish you had done differently in School/ College/ University?
- What makes you different from everyone else?
- What kind of contribution do you want to make, and how?
- When did you first become interested in your field of study and why?
- What motivates you?
- What are your goals? When did these become your goals, and why?
- Describe an experience that changed you. How did you change? What does this change mean?
In the end, the process is worth it. Finalizing a personal statement and getting it to a point where you’re happy with and proud of it is not easy and takes a huge amount of time and energy. But even if you don’t win or even get an interview, going through the process of defining yourself and accounting for your life and decisions to this point will help you step back, look around, and plan fully engage your future.
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