Writing a Personal Statement

The personal statement is the single most important component of most scholarship applications. It is your opportunity to speak to the selection committee in your own voice, to tell them who you are, why you study X, what you would like to do with your life, and why you need to complete a particular graduate program or academic experience along the way. A personal statement is challenging to write, but it is also an extremely useful learning experience. You will ask yourself, and begin to answer, important questions about what matters most to you, and why. You will dare yourself to think large about what you are capable of, and perhaps come to some important conclusions about the contribution you would like to make to the world, whether you win the scholarship or not. Writing a personal statement can also be the occasion for substantive conversations with your faculty mentors and advisors.

If the scholarship for which you are applying has a campus nomination process, the personal statement that you submit for this process is, in a sense, preliminary. Of course, your statement should be very well-written at this stage, but it is probably not the final version you will submit to the national competition if you are nominated. Students whom the University nominates generally receive feedback and suggestions for revision from the nominating committees before the application is sent forward.

There is no single right way to write a personal statement, but we hope the following tips will help you.

• Read the instructions for the specific scholarship and make sure that you follow them, especially as you refine your personal statement through successive drafts. Most scholarship instructions are open-ended enough to give you some leeway as to how to structure your statement and what to include. However, a personal statement that fails to address the requested topics will not help you, no matter how well-written. 

• Expect to write several drafts. Early in the writing process, allow yourself the freedom to try a variety of approaches and to write expansively, without worrying about length limits.  It’s better to start with too much than not enough.

• Use a style guide. We highly recommend The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White. It’s cheap, short, and sweet!

• Seek advice as you go. Early on, your faculty mentors and campus scholarship advisor can help you identify the most important, interesting, and original ideas in your rough draft; find the common threads; develop a structure; and identify ideas that should be clarified or expanded. Later, you may want advice about how to improve the style, usage, and flow of the essay. Ask several people for advice, but expect that their recommendations will differ. It’s your essay, and you are in charge of weighing the advice and deciding what is useful.

• Make your intellectual interests the heart of the statement. It is appropriate, and may be important, to write about some non-academic experiences. But describing an event in your childhood, a community service experience, an internship, or a leadership role should compliment your discussion of your intellectual interests. What do you study? Why is it important? What got you interested? What experiences led you here? What are the questions that you want to answer? What does—or should—your field of study contribute to the world, and to the common good? What bugs you about your field of study? What excites and motivates you as a scholar? What is the topic of your honors thesis or other research project? Why is the next logical step for you to study drama at Trinity College in Dublin or investigate social change in the Chinese countryside?

• Write in a clear, concise, straightforward style. This doesn’t mean that your writing must be boring, simplistic, and plodding! Have confidence that you are an interesting person with some great ideas, unique experiences, and worthy dreams. You don’t need to decorate your essay with ornate, emotion-laden, or excessively literary language to make it interesting. Be sure to define any specialized terms so that selection judges outside of your field will know what you’re talking about.

• Say what you really think. If you are overly focused on guessing what the selection committee wants to hear, you will write an application that sounds like everyone else’s and will put the selection committee to sleep.

• Select a small number of experiences to write about in some detail, rather than trying to cram everything in. Most scholarship applications also include a resume or a form on which you’re asked to list activities, jobs, etc. Your personal statement should not be a narrative version of your resume.

• Don’t waste words on “givens.” The selection committee doesn’t need to be told that Cambridge is one of the world’s greatest universities; they want to know your particular reasons for wanting to study mathematical logic there. 

• Show, don’t tell, what a great candidate you are. Leave it to your recommenders to praise your gifts as a writer, your dedication to community service, your passion for research, or your probing intellect. It’s your job to show these things implicitly by the way you write and the things you write about.

• Keep it positive. Express your eagerness to learn something new rather than deplore your ignorance for not knowing it already. Focus on what you have done, not what you haven’t. No one has done it all!

As you reach the final stages of the writing process, be meticulous. Your personal statement should be grammatically flawless and free of typos. The words should be carefully chosen, and the essay should flow naturally. Make sure that you are within the prescribed length limit.

return to top of page