Personal Statement

• Start brainstorming ideas of what you want the admissions directors to know about you.
  

• Create a mind map of all the points you want to include starting from who you are to what you want to study.

• Even though most of this essay will be based on your life experiences, you still want to make sure you’re being empirical and accurate. If you’re planning on pursuing a STEM major, this is especially important.
  

• If necessary, include facts, figures, and relevant material that support your points and appropriately reference them throughout your essay. This will show directors that you are meticulous and can think critically.

• Start writing!
  

• Even if it’s not completely structured, organizing your thoughts in writing will always give you a better idea of the direction for your essay.
  

• You should expect to produce several drafts of your personal statement before being totally happy with it.

• Ask friends to read it. Ask your professors for their feedback. Reach out to mentors in your desired field of study to go through it with you.
  

• Read it aloud to yourself. This part is is really important so that your audience can pick up on things that you may have missed or excluded.

• Once you’ve been through the steps, chances are you have a better idea of what you want to include in your personal statement and all that’s left are the final touches.
  

• Proofread, check for grammatical and spelling errors, make the necessary adjustments suggested through the critiquing phase, and you should have a complete personal statement.

Your essay should have a good balance of academic and non-academic content. Academic meaning research interests, subjects and courses you’re excited to take, articles you like, books you’ve read, or podcasts you’ve listened to. Non-academic would be personal hobbies, clubs you participate in, volunteer work, or other activities outside of school.

You want these two experiences to complement each other. Always find a way to relate your non-academic activities back to your academic pursuits. Maybe your volunteer work at a children’s home really honed your skills of nurturing and communicating and is the reason why you want to study education. Whatever it is, make sure they work together in your essay to drive your point home.

Pro Tip: Some people suggest using the 80/20 rule for your statement. 80% of the essay focusing on academic experiences while 20% focusing on non-academic experiences.

As mentioned in the How-To section, your essay should have some level of research put into it. But, you also don’t want to make the mistake of citing random numbers without any relevant context. With any research or personal element you include, you want there to be an underlying theme its meant to support. So, ideally, you would add a fact, contextualize it, then apply it to your message so that there is a cohesive story by the end of your statement.

It can be tempting to want to ‘wow’ those reading your personal statement by trying to jam all sorts of intellectual references into one essay. However, most admissions teams have probably been through thousands of essays that are doing the exact same thing. What always works out better is finding your niche and sticking to it throughout the essay. If you’ve read one really good book that’s influenced your life philosophy, then talk about that book at length and in detail. Don’t mention a bunch of books that have no meaning to you. Remember this is your chance to tell them who you are — authentically and uniquely.

The personal statement, although a personal testament to who you are, is not meant to be completely biographical. You want to approach it as an academic essay with the personal elements of your life used as supplementary details to your main point.