Advice on Writing an Effective Personal Statement

Advice on Writing an Effective Personal Statement Definition A personal statement is an autobiographical essay that many colleges, universities, and professional schools require as part of the admissions process. Also called a  statement of purpose, admissions essay, application essay, graduate school essay, letter of intent, and goals statement. The personal statement is generally used to determine a students ability to overcome obstacles, achieve goals, think critically, and write effectively. See Observations and Recommendations below. Also see: Compose a Narrative Essay or Personal StatementCritical ThinkingIllustrationNarrationPersonal EssayPersonal LetterRevision and Editing Checklist for a Narrative Essay Observations and  Recommendations Get good advice[T]he essay or personal statement began as a gauge of student enthusiasm (Why in particular do you wish to attend Bates College?). Over the years, it has been called upon to do other work: to capture how the applicant thinks; to reveal how he or she writes; to uncover information about values, spirit, personality, passions, interests, and maturity. . . .Admissions officers, counselors, teachers, and students in my survey rated what matters most in an application essay. All four groups agreed that the most important criteria are correctness, organization, specific evidence, and an individual style. . . .As an applicants best chance to plead his or her own case, the essay is a valuable piece in the admissions puzzle. Students need the advice of someone who knows them well to put together a convincing case, and parents are great resources, with their firsthand information about and commitment to their children.(Sarah Myers McGinty, The Application Essay. Chronicle of Hig her Education, January 25, 2002) Get startedIts difficult for most people to write about themselves, especially something personal or introspective. The following suggestions may help your creative juices to flow.Consult friends and relatives for ideas. . . .Take inventory of your unique experience, major influences, and abilities. . . .Write an experimental creative essay in which you are the main character. . . .Assemble your applications and determine how many essays you must write. . . .Get feedback from others before completing your final draft.(Mark Allen Stewart, How to Write the Perfect Personal Statement, 4th ed. Petersons, 2009) Keep it realAuthenticity is what matters in personal statements, in my experience. Strong writing and scrupulous proofreading are essential, but most of all, the topic and the expression must bring alive in the minds and hearts of the readers some aspect of the real teenager writing the statement. . . .Writing a strong personal statement calls upon you to observe your real life, a s it is, and get it on paper. Your best writing will emerge when you slow down to notice and record not just what happened, but also the small sensory details that make up the important and challenging events of your life. In a nutshell: Keep it real; show, don’t tell.(Susan Knight, director of college placement at the Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice in Brooklyn. The New York Times, September 11, 2009) Make it relevantWith so many students getting similar grades, personal statements are often all that universities have to go on, says Darren Barker of the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (Ucas). That’s why we advise applicants to take them seriously. . . .â€Å"You need to express yourself concisely and give thought to what universities are likely to regard as relevant, he says. If you have done work-shadowing in the field in which you have chosen an academic course, that’s obviously a plus. But even extra-curricular things on your CV can be worth including. . . .Personal statements are just that, personal. . . . This is about youwho you are, where you have come from and where you want to go. Bluff, spin a line, pretend you are something you are not and you will be found out.(Julie Flynn, Ucas Form: A Very Personal Statement of Intent. The Daily Telegraph, October 3, 2008) Be specificA possible area of discussion in your personal statement might be around what led you to pursue medicine as a career. You could discuss the courses, people, events or experiences that have influenced you and why. Discuss your extracurricular activities and why you participated. Tell about your educational experiences and summer internships. When doing so, write chronologically. . . .Be specific and do not exaggerate. Be philosophical and idealistic, but be realistic. Express your concern for others and share your unique experience that had a profound effect on your career choice. Express all of these things, but show your sense of value, partnership, independence and determination.(William G. Byrd, A Guide to Medical School Admission. Parthenon, 1997) FocusStatements may be weak for several reasons. The most foolish thing you can do probably is not to proofread what you write. Who wants to hire someone who turns in a statement with spelling, grammatical, or capitalization errors? An unfocused statement is also not likely to help you. Hiring institutions like to see focus, clarity, and coherence, not a stream-of-consciousness approach that seems incoherent to the reader, however coherent it may seem to you. Also, do not just say what you are interested in. Say what you have done about your interests.(Robert J. Sternberg, The Job Search. The Portable Mentor, ed. by M. J. Prinstein and M. D. Patterson. Kluwer Academic/Plenum, 2003) Know yourselfAdmissions officers say the most successful essays show curiosity and self-awareness. Says Cornells [Don] Saleh: Its the only thing that really lets us see inside your soul. While theres no one right formula for soul baring, there are many wrong ones. Its disastrous to write, as a Rice applic ant did, of what he could bring to the University of California. A self-absorbed or arrogant tone is also a guaranteed turnoff. Exhibit A: a Rice essay beginning, I have accumulated a fair amount of wisdom in a relatively limited time of life. Exhibit B: a Cornell applicant who set out to describe the indescribable essence of myself.(Jodie Morse et al., Inside College Admissions. Time, October 23, 2000)

How Drawing Doodles Can Help You in College

How Drawing Doodles Can Help You in College Imagine the following scenario: a college classroom with a teacher droning on and students spacing out. As your mind wanders and you begin to daydream, the person next to you is doodling in their notebook. You’re thinking that they won’t remember anything from this lecture either. You would be wrong. In fact, the doodler next to you is likely to retain 29% more information than you did from that boring lecture. Much has been made recently of the cognitive benefits of doodling. Books like The Doodle Revolution by Sunni Brown and Drawing is Magic by John Hendrix follow on the heels of a 2008 book Drawing is Thinking by Milton Glaser. According to these and other authors, what may seem like the physical representation of daydreaming is something that helps connect people to ideas and concepts that they’re being exposed to. Remember More For example, in a 2009 study conducted by Psychology professor Jackie Andrade tested the effects of doodling while listening to a boring telephone message. The subjects who were asked to doodle were able to remember more information contained in the message than the subjects who only listened to the message while sitting still. Another example was found in an article printed in the Wall Street Journal where medical student Michiko Maruyama explains how her â€Å"daily doodles† helps her to synthesize the information passed on in that day’s lecture. Her system seems to work well for her. In fact, when she tested it by stopping her doodling practice for a week, her grades suffered. Stimulate Creativity But doodling doesn’t only help you recall information. It can also help generate ideas. Architect Gabriela Goldshmidt conducted a study in 2014 in which a student doodled his name over and over again while meditating on a child’s kindergarten he was assigned to design. During the course of his doodling, he began to unlock a vision of the kindergarten and was able to transfer it to a sketch for class. The author of the book Drawing is Magic recalls that most people draw and doodle as children, but as adults, they stop. He encourages people to doodle in order to recreate the lightness and playfulness of childhood which is also where a wealth of creativity and ideas dwell. Find Joy in Learning In a study by Charlotte Hughes and Scott Asakawa, they report that when students were encouraged to â€Å"draw what they learned during lecture, and while doing assigned readings†¦[they] not only retained more information, but they also reported more enjoyment and engagement with the course material.† Elisabeth Irgens, a proponent of doodling, highlights the idea that the visual aspect of note-taking is like â€Å"adding some joy† to your notes and makes you want to take them out and look at them again. Try It If you want to try doodling and see what all the hype is about, here are some expert tips on how to get started: Grab some pencils, pens, markers or colored pencils. Whatever you like to use. You don’t have to make the whole thing official by buying a block of drawing paper. That can feel too intimidating. Just a regular notebook is fine for doodling. Many people find that a combination of words and drawings works best. Keywords from your reading or lecture paired with visual representations of your thoughts, associations and ideas. Think about the flow on the page most people are inclined to work from top to bottom and left to right. But that doesn’t mean you have to. Whatever flow makes sense to you as you move through the material and find your spacing on the page. Use colors as markers some people respond to colors in emotional ways. Colors can serve as ways to highlight a specific point or convey an opinion about a subject without putting that opinion into words. These are just some tips on doodling. There is no right or wrong way to do it. Try it out for yourself and see the results.