what is a personal statement

what is a personal statement

Crafting an Effective Personal Statement: A Comprehensive Guide

1. Introduction to Personal Statements

Always a good idea to keep a tab on the basic essay requirements.

What is the purpose of your personal statement? There are seven prompts to choose from for your Common App essay in 2021-2022. The main point of prompts, of course, is to help guide your writing—but most of the time, we don’t guide students toward one particular prompt. Suspect that the potential topics of your personal statement can impact the tone of your essay. For example, a lot of the prompts are related to intellectual interests, and intellectual interests are often demonstrated through extracurricular activities or the classroom—which means a more academic tone will be a good fit. The coronavirus pandemic isn’t a “bad” personal statement topic. Students interested in submitting an application to medical school in order, for a variety of different reasons, to become trained to treat patients with COVID-19 wouldn’t be discouraged from mentioning the coronavirus.

This could be a good third choice only if an applicant’s experiences were particularly compelling and if they have already covered other, more common experiences. Having a thoughtful and well-written personal statement is more crucial than ever. There are a few different reasons for this. Whereas a high GPA requires years of hard work, a personal statement can be thought up, written, revised, and edited over the span of a few weekends. Finally, research consistently shows that applicants considered favorites by admissions officers often have lower grades and test scores than those generally considered less competitive. The strength of your application is all about balance. A personal statement can help to balance an application that may appear busy with sports or one that’s filled with intellectual interests you haven’t actually pursued on a high level yet.

2. Identifying Your Unique Qualities and Experiences

How can you make yourself stand out as an applicant? What skills or experiences set you apart from your peers, your colleagues, or your classmates? In this chapter, we will guide you through an exercise to identify your unique skill set or characteristics or help you identify experiences in your life that have shaped you and are worth sharing with the admissions committee. What are your passions? Things that you value? What are you most proud of? If you have not already seen it, refer to the personal statement handout from the Pre-Health Office, which includes a few exercises to prompt you to start thinking about these concepts. Here are some additional things you might consider when brainstorming potential topics:

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First, you want to learn more about yourself! There are many ways to do this; here are five suggestions to get you started: Conduct an Interest Inventory. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) has 115 items based on Carl Jung’s theory about personality types. CareerReadyColorado uses an online interest assessment to connect them to 16 career clusters or pathways and career areas. Next is the O*Net Interest Profiler, which has 60 different types of questions to help you find the job that’s right for you. The Ohio Transfer to Degree Assurance Guide (OTAG) uses an online assessment to “help students understand how their personal attributes and interests are related to making a good career choice.”

3. Structuring Your Personal Statement for Impact

While having a good command of the language and grammar goes a long way, good content is only as good as its structuring. Think of it as the frame and structure of a house – everything needs to be well-coordinated to make sure you deliver a picture-perfect piece of writing. There aren’t set rules you absolutely must follow, though there is a basic structure that can make for a more comprehensive delivery of a message in the first go!

Some of the elements you may consider incorporating in your statement are a short introduction which presents why you are applying (doesn’t necessarily have to be personal), a body which describes attributes, strengths, work experience, skills, personal development, academic performance, careers counselling advice, and a conclusion which highlights suitability, questions of interests, and a bridge to what comes next. It may be useful to create a well-coordinated flow.

A good formulation can pack light and still not fail to stick with a reader. It is ideal for a reader to close a good statement with a sense that the applicant is someone we’d like to know more about and someone who seems to connect with their field. Another thing for a good placement of language and form would be to inspire. A faculty member who began a Ph.D. in Economics describes his personal entanglement with the field: “It was up until after my undergraduate degree that I started to realise that economics is not just about GDP and interest rates, but also about everyday experiences and people – people like me.” In what looks like a mild case of anthropology or even journalism, the statement brings me in contact with this fact. If it feels suspicious, it is. I want to learn something. I want to know what degrees I would have a student buy. Where would I place my buy order?

4. Showcasing Your Achievements and Goals

Accomplishments and aspirations are invaluable. The former serve as a testament to how much someone has achieved, while the latter provides insight into their future, often including ambition, character, and strengths. In the personal statement, both their accomplishments and their future goals should be put on high display. It can be tempting to put them one after the other, almost like two halves of the statement that don’t particularly stick together, but they are more effectively weaved into an undoubtedly compelling narrative. Throughout the statement, they need to be upfront but facially integrated into the narrative. Boasting experts recommend that readers should imply their strengths, not directly mention them.

In college or scholarship applications, both the tremendous achievements and the more modest deserve equal space in their contemplation. They tend to strengthen askers’ story, even though they may not be as flashy as the big trophies. Sometimes, they even pack a bigger emotional or experiential punch. They can take time to write and considerably beef up those short reflections that are such torture to begin from a blank canvas. Indeed, even if one knows half of the things they want to reflect on offhand, consolidating thought into a written statement might be more challenging than one might expect. However, it is most useful if they can, with a focused timeline, reflect on their path to this present moment.

5. Editing and Polishing Your Personal Statement

This is not a simple process to be rushed. For those of you who find it difficult to cut down word count, start with your content and ignore word limits before restructuring your statement in a shorter form. You will not be able to edit effectively if you concentrate too much on sentence structure, paragraph construction and word length at the start. In fact, it may be better if you do not consider word limits at all until this stage of the process. At this late stage, you will be primarily looking for better vocabulary and sentence structure, in order to make sentences more concise without losing any of your intended meanings. Look at techniques such as ‘strong verbs’ that can suggest an effect to eliminate adverbs and any unnecessary, weaker verbs.

In our experience, the most common comments by assignment reviewers on a first draft personal statement include: “It’s vague” or “The writing is ungrammatical”, in which case the best response is to read pages 61-68 of The Elements of Style before submitting your final personal statement. “That sounds redundant” or “Does one instance demonstrate several things at once, thus reducing redundancy?” Though the process of distilling a well-constructed personal statement into a highly effective, very readable, and scholarly piece of fact or fiction is empowering for a writer, ask yourself whether you see any benefit of chasing redundancy in this way? Regular readings and redrafts allow a writer to ensure that a personal statement is entirely coherent and that it provides useful information about a writer. Can it also help a writer discover how succinct he or she is naturally? In sum, strive to make the personal statement exactly 1000 words.