Quick Help For Personal Statements

Level 1 - Baby Steps

Welcome!

We were working with a client earlier today on their personal statement for early decision applications that inspired us to write a new post specifically about personal statements.

In our experience, personal statements can be difficult to write because most people view them as a long-form version of “tell me about yourself.”

The truth is that writing personal statements is less about your own individual statements and more about making sure that your personal statement addresses a few key point.

Make sure that your personal statement answers the question

You can write the best personal statement in the world - if it does not actually answer the question, it will probably fail the smell test. 

Here’s why:

If you have a job interview and someone asks for you to speak about your accomplishments, you could speak to accomplishments that tie back to the job you want, or you could just speak to your accomplishments. 

If you do the former, you are informing the individual about yourself as it relates to the job. If you do the latter, you are just providing information that may or may not be useful.

Here’s the other reason it helps - it keeps you focused.

A lot of personal statements provide interesting information, but they ramble. 

When you structure your response to the question being asked, it helps you read each piece of information and ask, “does this information actually tie back to the question at hand?” 

If it does not, get rid of it.

Stick to the limits

Most personal statements have pre-set word limits (e.g., 1 page, 500 words). Stick to these.

First, some automated software actually only sends the first 500 words. That means if you wrote 600 words, the last 100 will just be cut off from what the admissions officer can read.

Secondly, some admissions officers will rely only on the first 500 words of what they read to make an evaluation of your writing capabilities. You do not want to waste the first few hundred words doing a set up, only for the bulk of the good writing to end up never being read. 

Third, and probably most importantly, the character/word count actually gives you a good idea for the type of personal statement you can write.

If a personal statement is capped at 250 words for a scholarship, then you know it cannot be that robust. You have to find a way to be concise, which often means cutting all of the fluff. 

A little known tip: the more words/freedom you have to write for a personal statement, the more detail you can go provide. In other words, your personal statement for a 250 word limit essay should not be the same for an essay that is 500 words. If it is, then you are putting yourself at a disadvantage. 

Do Not Defeat Your Own Admissions Chances

If you have ever competed in anything, there is an old adage you may be familiar with - “Do not beat yourself.”

The meaning is pretty straight forward - do not let your own mistakes prevent you from being able to achieve something. If you are playing chess, you do not leave your queen to be taken by a pawn because of your own mistakes. 

If you are doing karate, you make sure that you memorize your form so you do not lose because you do not know the next action.

If you play football, you do not commit senseless penalties like false starts that kill your chances of being able to convert downs. 

Writing a personal statement is much the same. The competition will be difficult, but you cannot control the interesting story that someone else has.

What you can control are misspellings. Typos. Grammatical errors. These are the things that kill your essay regardless of how interesting it may be.

Fair or unfair, people judge you based on whether you make simple mistakes. And those mistakes make admissions officers question the academic integrity of the program that you went to. And you do not want that at all as your case is reviewed.

Make sure that the essay is proofread for these simple mistakes so you avoid any unnecessary biases in your direction.