Writing a personal statement helps clarify your personal qualities and your goals. The essay must be concise, reveal the qualities that identify you and reflect a strong sense of purpose. Most personal statements have length constraints.
Begin with an exercise in free-writing
- Recall the powerful experiences or memories in your life
- Highlight occasions when you felt the greatest accomplishment or pride in yourself
- Identify the qualities about yourself that are distinctive
- Identify people who have shaped your personal goals and direction in life
- Describe the experiences and stories behind the accomplishments on your resume and reflect on how you have learned from these experiences
- Use these stories to begin working on your personal statement. Ideally, a pattern or theme will emerge from your free-writing exercise that will help you choose the moments that are the most significant to you as a person and to your direction in life
Create a draft of your personal statement
- Share the personal qualities of your identity, outlook and life experiences
- Communicate how your goals were shaped by your experiences
- Describe what led you to care or become passionate about your goals
- Explain how you have prepared to meet these goals
- Connect your goals to the scholarship opportunity and to the organization’s goals and vision
- Tell good stories in which relevant details unfold seamlessly before the reader
- Incorporate anecdotes and images into your writing
- Resist restating your resume with a catalog of accomplishments
- Create an essay within the required length or word constraints
Re-writing and editing
- Every essay requires editing
- Show your first draft to several readers
- Allow sufficient time between your first and subsequent drafts to reflect on content and organization
- Be critical; write and rewrite
- Keep separate versions, in case you are not sure you want to omit something permanently
- Edit multiple times and with multiple readers