The personal statement is the most important essay you will write for your college applications. It is likely to be the longest essay you write, and is submitted to almost every school you apply to. On top of that, it is completely different from every other essay you have written before, and unlike anything else you will write ever again. This combines to make writing personal statements a unique challenge for students, one with exceptionally high stakes.
In this article we’re going to break down what admissions officers are really looking for in your personal statement, and the best way to give it to them. We’ll cover brainstorming, writing, and editing your personal statement to make sure it’s the best piece of work possible. Let’s get started!
What Admissions Officers Want from your Personal Statement
Before we begin discussing how to write it, we thought it best to cover why admissions officers ask for a personal statement in the first place, since that will inform the rest of our strategy. What admissions officers want is to understand who you are, and what experiences have led you to be that person. They want to understand you.
This is simultaneously a simple and complicated thing to answer and describe. Being able to define yourself confidently is a problem for many adults, and the challenge is not reduced for high school students, whose view of themselves is often not fully solidified.
The reason for this is that admissions officers need to get to know you. All they know about you is what you are able to tell them in your application materials. Your grades and test scores let them understand your academic potential. Your letters of recommendation tell them what kind of student you are, but it is the place of the personal statement to introduce you to them as a person.
Admissions officers are looking for certain kinds of students to admit to their schools, ones who will contribute to campus. This search for understanding leads to the personal statement, and for some schools, the supplemental essay questions.
How to Find a Topic for your Personal Statement
We have covered how to brainstorm before, but want to briefly cover picking a topic more generally. What you choose to write about for your personal statement is an odd proposition; simultaneously not terribly important and incredibly so. This seems contradictory, and it kind of is, but what we mean is this. The specific topic you choose can be anything, so long as you are able to use that topic to tell admissions officers about yourself.
This can, and has, led to some wildly creative essays. A common mistake is then thinking you can copy the success of one of these essays by writing on the same theme. Admissions officers already saw that essay and admitted that student; having one, they don’t need another. Your topic should instead reflect you, and your own goals and values.
In service of this, we recommend thinking about the following:
- What values inform your life and decision making? How do you express them?
- Which of your experiences have shaped who you are, and how you see the world?
- How do you spend most of your free time? Why?
- What makes you, you?
We do recommend that if you talk about experiences or extracurriculars, you limit yourself to your time in high school. If you began an activity early and have continued it up to this day you can include such, but most students change a great deal during high school, so admissions officers may be uncertain how well your middle school experiences depict your current state.
Finally, note that whatever you write about, admissions officers will have read an essay like it before. You do not need to come up with a truly original topic; instead you need to speak authentically to what you have done, how you see the world, and who you are as a person. This is what admissions officers care about.
The Writing Process for your Personal Statement
Writing a personal statement is a process. You cannot just create a single draft and say you’re done. This does not mean you need to work on it forever, simply that you should make sure you have written the best essay you possibly can before submitting it.
Writing begins with an outline in most cases. Take your idea, and lay out what you want to say about it. What core themes and experiences do you want to relate, and what did you learn from them? You should not use the five paragraph essay structure popularized by AP classes, but organizing your essay into paragraphs makes your thought process more coherent for your readers.
You are not bound to this structure, and may end up altering it significantly after creating a first draft, and seeing what works and what doesn’t. That said, having a scaffolding to build with makes the writing process smoother, and less daunting to pursue. An outline is especially helpful if your personal statement is not a single narrative, but instead a series of vignettes on a central theme. The outline here helps keep your ideas organized and focused.
With your outline completed, you can then compose a rough draft of your essay. Here is the advice we give to our students when they are composing their draft:
- Don’t worry too much about word count. We will later, but for this draft, try to keep it between 500 and 800 words.
- If you’re having trouble with the introduction, begin with the body paragraphs, then come back and write the beginning.
- You do not need to have a solid thesis yet, but should start thinking about it.
Once the draft is done, take a short break before you review it. We recommend doing this between each round of revisions. Taking a few days away lets you come back to your essay with fresh eyes, and will allow you to notice details that you missed previously.
When rereading your rough draft, try to identify the themes in your essay. When you read it, what do you really learn about the author, and what impression do you get of them? What values are expressed, and how convincingly are they portrayed? Do the transitions between paragraphs make sense?
We have an entire article on how to edit your essays, but we’ll cover some key points here:
- Begin big, then work small. If you decide a whole paragraph needs to be cut to make your essay’s theme make sense, there’s no sense in perfecting the language within it. Begin with the essay and its themes as a whole, then each paragraph, then individual sentences, before finally considering word choice.
- Show, don’t tell. This is old and cliched writing advice, but it remains true. Instead of telling admissions officers that you love playing soccer, demonstrate it to them through your description of the game, and the time and sweat you spent perfecting it.
- Revise your thesis as needed to reflect the themes and message of your essay. If it goes too far from what you want to be saying, you may need to rework the essay entirely.
- Look for outside input. While you have to write the essay yourself, getting writing advice from your teachers or other mentors can greatly improve your writing, as they are liable to notice things you do not.
You should also remember that editing is a process. Some personal statements only need a few drafts to get to the version that truly defines you, while others require far more effort to polish. Our students go through anywhere from 3-10 drafts. Again, do not obsess over them, but put in enough work that you are sure what you are submitting is the best writing you are capable of.
Finally, make sure you know when to stop the editing process. There is sometimes a temptation to continue tweaking and revising, changing details and themes in pursuit of some unknown ideal. We recommend taking some time to breathe, and to realize that after a certain point, editing is no longer constructive to the process. Where that line is differs between different authors, of course, but as a rule of thumb, ten drafts is a good benchmark.
Essay Scraps
You may end up with essay ideas that you do not end up using in the final drafts, but which still contain interesting ideas or well written prose. We often move these to a scraps section of the document instead of deleting them outright, in case there is material in them which can be reused in your supplemental essays.
This also works for ideas. You will come up with many possible topics for your personal statement, but in the end only get to write a single essay. Keep your brainstorming work around, and refer back to it when you need to find topics to respond to common supplemental essay prompts.
Final Thoughts
The personal statement is often a daunting thing, especially when you are stuck staring at a blank screen, waiting for inspiration to strike. We hope that this guide has given you concrete and useful steps you can take while writing your own personal statement, and that you are able to tell admissions officers your story well.
Of course, you don’t have to do it alone. Ivy Scholars are experts at helping students craft amazing essays; you can find examples of our past work here. If you want help on your own personal statement, or otherwise want advice on your college applications journey, schedule a free consultation today. We have a long experience in helping students tell their own unique stories, and are always happy to hear from you.
