Personal Statements
Personal Statements: Putting a professional self on the page
For Others to See You as a Professional
The personal statement helps application committees learn who you are as a professional. It shows them whether you understand what their program does, and tells them how that program fits with what you want to do.
It also gives you a chance to speak in a positive way about anything in your application paperwork that you need to address (such as having a low cumulative GPA--but maybe you have a high GPA in your interest area, or a lot of GPA improvement over time).
For You to See Yourself as a Professional
The personal statement helps you learn who you are as a professional. No one else will make this time for you to figure out how your interests connect with each other and your goals. Only you can do that.
All people must do this process in order to get an education that actually serves them, and get into work they actually want to do. (If the possibilities seem overwhelming, spend the time to reflect on what matters to you.)
It is an important professional development milestone.
How does a personal statement do that?
Writing a personal statement helps you find the words to talk about your own background and experience as a professional qualification. Sharing drafts with readers who share your interests or are in your field teaches you what words are reaching the people you want to reach.
It makes you decide on strategic disclosure--what do you want to talk about because it serves you as a professional? What is nobody’s business?
It makes you identify what makes a program fit your needs and interests. This helps you choose what programs you want to apply to, and tell those programs why you want to be there.
Get extra mileage!
You can use sentences or paragraphs from your personal statement for future application essay questions, cover letters, requests for informational interviews, or to give people writing you letters of recommendation info to help them write you a strong letter.
Getting Started
Past
What are three things you have already done or been part of that helped you realize what you care most about doing, and develop your interests?
These things can have been part of a job/volunteering, school, or your life. Write them down.
Present
What are three things that you’re doing now that are important to what you care about, and/or skills you want to help you prepare for what you’d like to do in the future?
Examples may include EXITO, working in a lab, shadowing, taking courses in X, volunteering at Y, etc.
Future
Think about your next steps or future plans. What are three things you would need to flourish in an education or training program in that field?
For instance: I want an MPH; it needs to care about community-engaged work with low-income people; it needs to offer strong mentoring.
Other approaches that work to get started
Record yourself with a phone voice recorder. You can talk alone or with a friend about what you're interested in. Then, you can use the recording to transcribe what you said (you can try using a free transcriber like: https://speechnotes.co/). Great if you're getting tripped up when typing. Lisa did this when getting started with her faculty personal statement. Great way to get started if it's hard to start.
Draw it by creating a mind map - how are the things you care about connected?
Putting it together
A personal statement is a narrative, a story.
You can organize it: Past, Present, Future (I started here, then I did X, then I did Y, now I’m doing Z, I want to do Q, and that’s why I'm interested in your program).
Another way to organize it: Present, Past, Future (Currently I’m doing X. Here’s how I got here. Here’s why my next step is Y, and your program is where I want to take it).
If you put the points you created into one of those two orders, you’ll have the first draft of a personal statement.
It’s not your life story. It’s the story of your life and vision as a professional: how your past and present experience guided you to your professional interests and the work you want to do. How those interests lead you toward particular goals in the future. What is the next step you want to take--and what features make the particular program/resource you're applying to especially interesting and helpful for this kind of work.
Key things to remember
Writing is a process - Those great pieces of writing? They're not smarter people, they're people who took time to revise. Expect to revise. Every piece of narrative writing needs to go through at least three drafts. To revise, you need readers who can stand in for your target audience, to tell you what they understood from what you wrote. Then you can adjust your language until the readers understand what you want them to understand.
Aaron's "Hats" - You have a "writer hat" and an "editor hat". You can only wear one hat at a time. Write without worrying about sentence structure - just get it out (bullets, copy/paste, transcribe audio - whatever it takes). Then come back to edit another time--find out what the text on the page tells you.
Get readers - share drafts and get fresh eyes. Come to writing workshops to get readers or be a reader -- great way to see the process and get revisions.
Leveling Up
Revising
Tone of writing matters! Check out pro tips about the tone of your professional writing from Purdue's Online Writing lab.
Write in active voice. Passive voice=you can add “by zombies” into the sentence.
Active: I applied to the EXITO program. The program invited me to join.
Passive: Program application was done [by zombies]. Acceptance was offered [by zombies].
Personal statements help the application site know what you’re passionate about - ***tell them this up front****. Make it easy for them to see that you are applying to this opportunity. Reviewers are tired. Connect these dots for them.
Variations on a Theme
Family of essays describing your professional self: Graduate school applications may ask for a personal statement, a statement of purpose, and/or a statement of research interests. All are variations of you describing your professional self.
Personal statements generally describe your path and rationale for pursuing graduate school.
Statement of purpose essays describe you specific reason (or purpose) for applying to graduate school and that program, in particular.
Statement of research interests highlight your research experience and what you propose to do, research-wise, in graduate school.
Lessons learned about personal statements from EXITO alums
In General
You'll often hear advice to start it early. Many draft their personal statements in EXITO's summer Immersion program or when needed for an application.
Use a starter -- you may be able to find some prompts/text from former essays (e.g., when you applied to EXITO, etc.). Many building blocks are already there.
Getting Started
Talk to people who share your interests. Record yourself or take notes after you've been talking about what's really exciting to you, and your goals.
Start anywhere. It doesn't matter how good, how long, whether it's in complete sentences or bullet points, what language it's in. Just start a draft.
Resources
Bedford Handbooks on writing - Aaron recommends Diana Hacker, some with Nancy Sommers & others. This series has everything from pocket guides to grammar and punctuation, to handbooks on how to write an academic paper or thesis, to writing handbooks for English-language learners. It was created by community college and university staff working with hundreds of student writers. They're common and it's easy to find cheap used copies. For handbooks with citation guides (includes how to cite internet videos, interviews, etc.), get the most recent edition you can afford.
Purdue Online Writing Lab - Amazing resource for all kinds of academic and non-academic writing, with pages on personal statements and tone of business writing. They feature top 10 tips and pitfalls and give examples of successful personal statements. They also describe how personal statements can differ from Statements of Purpose and Statement of Research Interests, both used in some graduate school applications.
Citation: Raz Link, A. and Marriott, L.K. (2021, April 28). Personal Statements. EXITO Enrichment. https://sites.google.com/view/exitoenrichment
Cover Photo by Daiga Ellaby on Unsplash.