Week 10 (Nov. 7) Drafting Personal Statements

Our session on November 7 was the first opportunity for students in our STEP cohort to brainstorm ideas around creating a personal statement. (Their task was not to compose a statement . . . not quite yet.)

As a writing teacher, I know that personal statements are one of the most challenging genres for any writer–undergraduate, graduate students, assistant professors composing teaching statements. They task is vexing. Nearly every element is an unknown: Who will be reading this? What are they looking for? Just what am I expected to tell them? Am I trying to persuade them? Inform them? Entertain them? (By the way, the answer to these last three questions, generally speaking, is “Yes! But . . . .”)

For a useful general resource on writing personal statements, check out the Purdue OWL site.

One particular page that might be of interest is “Top 10 Rules and Pitfalls.”

Many of our STEP cohort sessions early in the term were spent exploring (and recording in STEP journals) personal values, academic and professional goals, and experiences and individuals who had impacted their growth, development, and beliefs–and linking those to the STEP project categories. All of these elements–in various measure and to different effect–can inform and contribute to a successful personal statement.

As we discussed brainstorming toward a personal statement, I reminded students that different audiences and purposes will lead to different statements emphasizing different facets of their lives, interests, and skills. For example, a faculty member reviewing personal statements from students seeking to undertake research will likely be seeking different information (and be persuaded by different content) than a head of a non-profit organization looking for interns to serve as program coordinators at a summer outdoor adventure program.

I didn’t have a particularly nuanced way of trying to illustrate this to them, but I drew a series of overlapping circles, a kind of Venn diagram, on the board and labeled each (e.g., values, academic interests)–but then explained that (again, depending on the audience and purpose) one or more of the circles would likely be more important in a given statement. For that professor considering leading an undergraduate research project, academic interests and goals will likely be critically important, while the non-profit head will be interested in past experiences working with children, relevant outdoor skills, and commitment to public service and volunteerism.

During our Nov. 7 session, students spent about 30 minutes or so drafting responses to a series of questions:

1. Who are you?
2. What are your interests?
3. What are your personal values?
4. What are your personal goals?
5. What are your professional goals?
6. What are your academic interests?
7. What matters to you?
8. What does your future look like?
9. What matters to you?
10. What does your future look like?
11. Who do you aspire to be?
12. What/who has influenced your growth/development?

At the close of the session, I asked students to save their brainstorming and also leave me with a list of questions about or challenges they face when drafting personal statements.

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I then passed these questions along to Dr. Chris Manion from the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing, who’ll join us at our November 14 session for a writing workshop on crafting personal statements.

Here are the students’ questions and challenges:

Questions:

1. Can I use “I” statements?
2. How personal do we get with personal statements?
3. Do we need an emotional appeal when writing personal statements?
4. How professional should this be?
5. If our personal, academic, and professional goals overlap, how should we go about outlining the statement?
6. How much about yourself are you supposed to include?
7. Should the focus be “all about me” or “here’s why I would get this exact internship”? (Should explicitly say things like “This internship aligns with my academic interests” or should it be more nuanced?)
8. What is relevant?
9. How general should I be? How specific?
10. How do I narrow down what is most important to include in my personal statement?
11. Are there any specific qualities that one should try to emphasize in the personal statement?
12. How do you format a personal statement?
13. How long should it be?

Challenges:

1. Finding a way to not make a personal statement sound cheesy will be difficult.
2. Finding a way to make the things I want to say genuine instead of just saying hem to try to get the internship, job, etc.
3. I’ve always struggled writing out who I am as a person and who I aspire to be b/c I am still unsure of what I want to do with my life.
4. It’s hard to find out what the committee that’s looking at these wants.

Composing personal statements is vexing, and hard work–but considering audience and purpose and continually returning to values, academic interests, and professional goals to tie them to a particular STEP project area will certainly reduce the challenge.

As an additional resource, please review the Writing Personal Statements for Graduate School document and webinar from our Nov. 14 session: https://www.dropbox.com/s/uwyly2mw4v4mx90/RRM2018_GradApplicationWebinar.mp4?dl=0