A personal statement is a story about your personal experiences, your work, and volunteer. It includes experiences and everything in the past that has made you the person that you are today and led you to arrive at this juncture where you’re motivated to apply to college. A personal statement is typically used by the admissions office to figure out whether you fit into their student community or their student body.
On the other hand, is a bridge between your past experience and the future that you want to build at this program specifically at this university. It requires the admissions officer to convince you that you have the right skills to take the course and that you are really excited about it. You need to start strong and prove why they should choose you.
Before you begin writing that perfect personal statements for college admission have a look for the ways to make it effective and worthwhile.
Table of Contents
Put your face on the page
The main goal of the statement is to make all these numbers about you, your transcripts, your GRE scores, take all these numbers and make them come alive, make you live as a person. It is called putting your face on the page.
Don’t Panic and Brainstorm
Don’t put the question in front of you and stare and stare and panic and look at your watch, and go” it’s due in three”, don’t do that to yourself. Students can avoid it by thinking about categories, jobs you have had, the skills you have, the awards you’ve won. Ten things that related to that career you’re thinking about what you believe really would.
Ten things from your life that have nothing to do with this potential career and make all these categories and fill them infill them in with whatever you think of including things that are probably bad ideas and won’t come into your essay but give it to yourself.
Let it all flow and edit it later
Sit down and set a timer for maybe ten minutes and you write. And you write and write and you whatever comes whatever connecting ideas that you didn’t think of you just let it all flow. You’re tapping into your subconscious a little bit and what happens is images you didn’t know would come, there’s a lot of power in your writing that wasn’t there before.
Keep your writing lively
Once you have figured out how you want to focus your essay, what you want to say, it needs to be interesting. The essay must not be boring, flat, stilted. Lots of people worry that when they are writing something professional and it has to be very formal. You can’t be completely casual, but it needs to have vividness. The way you do that is to use sensory details like sights, sound, touch, taste, and smell that’s one good way, concrete nouns.
Students must avoid the words things and aspects from their writing. You don’t want to say “there are many things about your program. I like”…you want to say “I want to attend your program because of the psychoeducational diagnostic. Then it will seem like you’ve done your homework and you know about them, and you’re specifically interested in them. You never want to give them the feeling that you’ve written the same essay for ten different schools.
Make it clear you have done your homework
You need to focus on them and what they’re offering. While we’re on the subject of banning could everybody try to ban the verb to be, is, was? Go through your easy and try to get rid of those words and replace them with active verbs. Right there if you do that it’ll tighten your writing, elevate it and make it more powerful.
That’s like the one, my gifts to you take that, and you will improve your essay enormously. Show them you know them, refer to specific courses, programs, professors, research, show that this program is a good fit for you not just that you’re a good fit them. Show them that you have paid attention and interested.
Show your care
You need to follow the rules. If they say 500 words, you need to make sure that it is not exactly 500 but under 500 words. You cannot be 503 because for one it shows it at the bottom of the screen, they know it’s 503 and it’s disrespectful, it shows them you weren’t paying attention, that you didn’t care and that will set a tone with them.
By the same token, you need to make this perfect in the sense that the grammar, the punctuation, the spelling needs to be perfect and that’s another way of showing you understand that this is a professional document, maybe you were not perfect on apostrophes. Get help with them because this document needs to reflect your knowledge that it’s a professional document.
Answer every part of every question
Make sure to answer all parts of the question. So if they say “talk about a time you failed, what happened and why?” make sure you get to all three parts.
Make sure your essay reflects your work
A friend can look at your categories with you or have someone help you with apostrophes; it is good to get help. This is what professionals do, and this is what you need to do. Many people come from cultures where it’s not ok to get help, where you’re supposed to do your writing all by yourself but it’s ok here.
Don’t go and ask your friend the English teacher to write it for you, that’s not ok. So we’re talking about getting feedback, having them ask questions but don’t let them take out their red pen and completely redo your essay for you that’s over the line. You want to leave yourself a lot of time.
Give time to yourself
You want to leave yourself a lot of time. Students usually do four things in one hour sessions like one on prewriting, drafting, revising, and proofreading. And that’s in addition to all the time they used to spend by themselves working on it. So you want to make sure you have sort of got time for all of those sections. If you write the application the night before, you are not giving yourself your best chance, and that’s what we want for you that you give yourself your best chance.
Get another perspective
Ask your friends and families about their perspectives and pick out what might help tell your story and focus who you are. Because we often can’t see what in your own story might help tell it.
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