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• How to Write Your Personal Statement | Strategies & Examples

How to Write Your Personal Statement | Strategies & Examples

Published on February 12, 2019 by Shona McCombes . Revised on July 3, 2023.

A personal statement is a short essay of around 500–1,000 words, in which you tell a compelling story about who you are, what drives you, and why you’re applying.

To write a successful personal statement for a graduate school application , don’t just summarize your experience; instead, craft a focused narrative in your own voice. Aim to demonstrate three things:

• Your personality: what are your interests, values, and motivations?
• Your talents: what can you bring to the program?
• Your goals: what do you hope the program will do for you?

This article guides you through some winning strategies to build a strong, well-structured personal statement for a master’s or PhD application. You can download the full examples below.

Urban Planning Psychology History

Table of contents

Getting started with your personal statement, the introduction: start with an attention-grabbing opening, the main body: craft your narrative, the conclusion: look ahead, revising, editing, and proofreading your personal statement, frequently asked questions, other interesting articles.

Before you start writing, the first step is to understand exactly what’s expected of you. If the application gives you a question or prompt for your personal statement, the most important thing is to respond to it directly.

For example, you might be asked to focus on the development of your personal identity; challenges you have faced in your life; or your career motivations. This will shape your focus and emphasis—but you still need to find your own unique approach to answering it.

There’s no universal template for a personal statement; it’s your chance to be creative and let your own voice shine through. But there are strategies you can use to build a compelling, well-structured story.

The first paragraph of your personal statement should set the tone and lead smoothly into the story you want to tell.

Strategy 1: Open with a concrete scene

An effective way to catch the reader’s attention is to set up a scene that illustrates something about your character and interests. If you’re stuck, try thinking about:

• A personal experience that changed your perspective
• A story from your family’s history
• A memorable teacher or learning experience
• An unusual or unexpected encounter

To write an effective scene, try to go beyond straightforward description; start with an intriguing sentence that pulls the reader in, and give concrete details to create a convincing atmosphere.

Strategy 2: Open with your motivations

To emphasize your enthusiasm and commitment, you can start by explaining your interest in the subject you want to study or the career path you want to follow.

Just stating that it interests you isn’t enough: first, you need to figure out why you’re interested in this field:

• Is it a longstanding passion or a recent discovery?
• Does it come naturally or have you had to work hard at it?
• How does it fit into the rest of your life?
• What do you think it contributes to society?

Tips for the introduction

• Don’t start on a cliche: avoid phrases like “Ever since I was a child…” or “For as long as I can remember…”
• Do save the introduction for last. If you’re struggling to come up with a strong opening, leave it aside, and note down any interesting ideas that occur to you as you write the rest of the personal statement.

Once you’ve set up the main themes of your personal statement, you’ll delve into more detail about your experiences and motivations.

To structure the body of your personal statement, there are various strategies you can use.

Strategy 1: Describe your development over time

One of the simplest strategies is to give a chronological overview of key experiences that have led you to apply for graduate school.

• What first sparked your interest in the field?
• Which classes, assignments, classmates, internships, or other activities helped you develop your knowledge and skills?
• Where do you want to go next? How does this program fit into your future plans?

Don’t try to include absolutely everything you’ve done—pick out highlights that are relevant to your application. Aim to craft a compelling narrative that shows how you’ve changed and actively developed yourself.

My interest in psychology was first sparked early in my high school career. Though somewhat scientifically inclined, I found that what interested me most was not the equations we learned about in physics and chemistry, but the motivations and perceptions of my fellow students, and the subtle social dynamics that I observed inside and outside the classroom. I wanted to learn how our identities, beliefs, and behaviours are shaped through our interactions with others, so I decided to major in Social Psychology. My undergraduate studies deepened my understanding of, and fascination with, the interplay between an individual mind and its social context.During my studies, I acquired a solid foundation of knowledge about concepts like social influence and group dynamics, but I also took classes on various topics not strictly related to my major. I was particularly interested in how other fields intersect with psychology—the classes I took on media studies, biology, and literature all enhanced my understanding of psychological concepts by providing different lenses through which to look at the issues involved.

Strategy 2: Own your challenges and obstacles

If your path to graduate school hasn’t been easy or straightforward, you can turn this into a strength, and structure your personal statement as a story of overcoming obstacles.

• Is your social, cultural or economic background underrepresented in the field? Show how your experiences will contribute a unique perspective.
• Do you have gaps in your resume or lower-than-ideal grades? Explain the challenges you faced and how you dealt with them.

Don’t focus too heavily on negatives, but use them to highlight your positive qualities. Resilience, resourcefulness and perseverance make you a promising graduate school candidate.

Growing up working class, urban decay becomes depressingly familiar. The sight of a row of abandoned houses does not surprise me, but it continues to bother me. Since high school, I have been determined to pursue a career in urban planning. While people of my background experience the consequences of urban planning decisions first-hand, we are underrepresented in the field itself. Ironically, given my motivation, my economic background has made my studies challenging. I was fortunate enough to be awarded a scholarship for my undergraduate studies, but after graduation I took jobs in unrelated fields to help support my parents. In the three years since, I have not lost my ambition. Now I am keen to resume my studies, and I believe I can bring an invaluable perspective to the table: that of the people most impacted by the decisions of urban planners.

Strategy 3: Demonstrate your knowledge of the field

Especially if you’re applying for a PhD or another research-focused program, it’s a good idea to show your familiarity with the subject and the department. Your personal statement can focus on the area you want to specialize in and reflect on why it matters to you.

• Reflect on the topics or themes that you’ve focused on in your studies. What draws you to them?
• Discuss any academic achievements, influential teachers, or other highlights of your education.
• Talk about the questions you’d like to explore in your research and why you think they’re important.

The personal statement isn’t a research proposal , so don’t go overboard on detail—but it’s a great opportunity to show your enthusiasm for the field and your capacity for original thinking.

In applying for this research program, my intention is to build on the multidisciplinary approach I have taken in my studies so far, combining knowledge from disparate fields of study to better understand psychological concepts and issues. The Media Psychology program stands out to me as the perfect environment for this kind of research, given its researchers’ openness to collaboration across diverse fields. I am impressed by the department’s innovative interdisciplinary projects that focus on the shifting landscape of media and technology, and I hope that my own work can follow a similarly trailblazing approach. More specifically, I want to develop my understanding of the intersection of psychology and media studies, and explore how media psychology theories and methods might be applied to neurodivergent minds. I am interested not only in media psychology but also in psychological disorders, and how the two interact. This is something I touched on during my undergraduate studies and that I’m excited to delve into further.

Strategy 4: Discuss your professional ambitions

Especially if you’re applying for a more professionally-oriented program (such as an MBA), it’s a good idea to focus on concrete goals and how the program will help you achieve them.

• If your career is just getting started, show how your character is suited to the field, and explain how graduate school will help you develop your talents.
• If you have already worked in the profession, show what you’ve achieved so far, and explain how the program will allow you to take the next step.
• If you are planning a career change, explain what has driven this decision and how your existing experience will help you succeed.

Don’t just state the position you want to achieve. You should demonstrate that you’ve put plenty of thought into your career plans and show why you’re well-suited to this profession.

One thing that fascinated me about the field during my undergraduate studies was the sheer number of different elements whose interactions constitute a person’s experience of an urban environment. Any number of factors could transform the scene I described at the beginning: What if there were no bus route? Better community outreach in the neighborhood? Worse law enforcement? More or fewer jobs available in the area? Some of these factors are out of the hands of an urban planner, but without taking them all into consideration, the planner has an incomplete picture of their task. Through further study I hope to develop my understanding of how these disparate elements combine and interact to create the urban environment. I am interested in the social, psychological and political effects our surroundings have on our lives. My studies will allow me to work on projects directly affecting the kinds of working-class urban communities I know well. I believe I can bring my own experiences, as well as my education, to bear upon the problem of improving infrastructure and quality of life in these communities.

Tips for the main body

• Don’t rehash your resume by trying to summarize everything you’ve done so far; the personal statement isn’t about listing your academic or professional experience, but about reflecting, evaluating, and relating it to broader themes.
• Do make your statements into stories: Instead of saying you’re hard-working and self-motivated, write about your internship where you took the initiative to start a new project. Instead of saying you’ve always loved reading, reflect on a novel or poem that changed your perspective.

Your conclusion should bring the focus back to the program and what you hope to get out of it, whether that’s developing practical skills, exploring intellectual questions, or both.

Emphasize the fit with your specific interests, showing why this program would be the best way to achieve your aims.

Strategy 1: What do you want to know?

If you’re applying for a more academic or research-focused program, end on a note of curiosity: what do you hope to learn, and why do you think this is the best place to learn it?

If there are specific classes or faculty members that you’re excited to learn from, this is the place to express your enthusiasm.

Strategy 2: What do you want to do?

If you’re applying for a program that focuses more on professional training, your conclusion can look to your career aspirations: what role do you want to play in society, and why is this program the best choice to help you get there?

Tips for the conclusion

• Don’t summarize what you’ve already said. You have limited space in a personal statement, so use it wisely!
• Do think bigger than yourself: try to express how your individual aspirations relate to your local community, your academic field, or society more broadly. It’s not just about what you’ll get out of graduate school, but about what you’ll be able to give back.

You’ll be expected to do a lot of writing in graduate school, so make a good first impression: leave yourself plenty of time to revise and polish the text.

Your style doesn’t have to be as formal as other kinds of academic writing, but it should be clear, direct and coherent. Make sure that each paragraph flows smoothly from the last, using topic sentences and transitions to create clear connections between each part.

Don’t be afraid to rewrite and restructure as much as necessary. Since you have a lot of freedom in the structure of a personal statement, you can experiment and move information around to see what works best.

Finally, it’s essential to carefully proofread your personal statement and fix any language errors. Before you submit your application, consider investing in professional personal statement editing . For $150, you have the peace of mind that your personal statement is grammatically correct, strong in term of your arguments, and free of awkward mistakes.

A statement of purpose is usually more formal, focusing on your academic or professional goals. It shouldn’t include anything that isn’t directly relevant to the application.

A personal statement can often be more creative. It might tell a story that isn’t directly related to the application, but that shows something about your personality, values, and motivations.

However, both types of document have the same overall goal: to demonstrate your potential as a graduate student and s how why you’re a great match for the program.

The typical length of a personal statement for graduate school applications is between 500 and 1,000 words.

Different programs have different requirements, so always check if there’s a minimum or maximum length and stick to the guidelines. If there is no recommended word count, aim for no more than 1-2 pages.

If you’re applying to multiple graduate school programs, you should tailor your personal statement to each application.

Some applications provide a prompt or question. In this case, you might have to write a new personal statement from scratch: the most important task is to respond to what you have been asked.

If there’s no prompt or guidelines, you can re-use the same idea for your personal statement – but change the details wherever relevant, making sure to emphasize why you’re applying to this specific program.

If the application also includes other essays, such as a statement of purpose , you might have to revise your personal statement to avoid repeating the same information.

If you want to know more about college essays , academic writing , and AI tools , make sure to check out some of our other language articles with explanations, examples, and quizzes.

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• College essay length
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• Avoiding repetition
• Literature review
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• Thesis acknowledgements
• Burned or burnt
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• Gray or grey
• Theater vs theatre

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How to Write an Excellent Personal Statement (Video)

Aim to craft an excellent personal statement, because this is your chance to show an admissions committee that you are the ideal candidate for them to teach on their course..

In this video, Jane Marshall, currently a Widening Participation Manager at  Imperial College London , talks about the do's and don’ts of an excellent personal statement.

Ms Marshall is certainly an inspiring and enjoyable speaker and an experienced professional with background from the London Schools of Economics and the  Institute of Education at UCL.

Treat the personal statement as you would an important piece of academic work. Don’t jump in with both feet first — take time to brainstorm ideas (try Googling "mind-mapping" and "spider diagram" techniques) and think carefully about the content and structure.

Remember that, first and foremost, this is an application for a course of study. So aim to focus at least two-thirds of your 47-line (4,000-character) statement on your academic motivations and interests. Show that you have an understanding of the subject and a genuine interest in it.

You will be expected to show that you have gained sufficient work experience or career knowledge through, for example, work shadowing, observations, taster days or networking with professionals.

Your personal statement should focus not just on what you did but on a reflection of what you learned about the career and the skills that it requires.

First impression

The first impression counts the most. Creating an original and engaging start to your statement will help to hold the reader’s interest throughout. Be positive. Even if selling yourself is a skill that you are not comfortable with, now is the time to embrace it.

Keep your language clear, concise and honest. Your personal statement should sound as though it’s coming from you, not a thesaurus.

Make it personal. Your statement should not sound generic. It should pull together all the motivations, interests and experiences that make you unique as a person.

Be prepared to write several drafts before you have a final version that you are happy with.

And remember to always proofread for errors (and get others to proofread it too) – an excellent personal statement, but one full of mistakes reveals a sloppy attitude and a lack of attention to detail.

Enjoy watching the video and don’t forget to comment!

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Our goal is to build a highly qualified and diverse student population. We still accept the Common Application, as well as, the traditional AUR online application; however, we have now created the American University of Rome video application to provide another platform for students to show us why they want to attend AUR, and how they will fit into our close-knit international community of learners.

Application Components:

• Short video (2-3 minutes) that responds to the prompt below
• Written response to ONE admissions essay prompt
• Online application or Common Application
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Be creative! But remember, your video submission is only a part of a holistic admissions approach. Applicants will not be accepted based on their video alone.

Video Prompt:

The American University of Rome prepares students to live and work across cultures as skilled and knowledgeable citizens of an interconnected and ever-changing world. AUR is home to a highly diverse student body of roughly 500 students representing over forty countries. In reflection of this eclectic student body, students bring to the table a diversity in perspective that contributes and enriches our classrooms and campus. Tell us about how your personality and experience will contribute to our rich student body. We want to know: Why are you AUR?

Video Guidelines:

• Your video should begin with a short clip of you in front of the camera saying, “Hi, my name is [insert name] from [insert hometown and state].
• After that, what you choose to say and how you choose to say it is up to you. However, all videos must adhere to the basic YouTube guidelines .
• Videos will not be evaluated for production quality; simple is fine (you can even use your phone), but you video must be a minimum of 2 minutes and a maximum of 3 minutes long.

How to Submit your Video:

Once you have created your video application you may submit it by uploading it as an “unlisted” video to YouTube, and then sharing the link with our Admissions team by emailing it to [email protected] . Please click on the following link for help with uploading your video to YouTube: Video Upload Guidelines .

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AI companies train language models on YouTube’s archive − making family-and -friends videos a privacy risk

Senior Researcher, Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure, UMass Amherst

Associate Professor of Public Policy, Communication, and Information, UMass Amherst

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My work - and the work we refer to in this article - is supported by the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Knight Foundation and the National Science Foundation. I am on the board of several nonprofit organizations, including Global Voices, but none are directly connected to politics.

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The promised artificial intelligence revolution requires data. Lots and lots of data. OpenAI and Google have begun using YouTube videos to train their text-based AI models . But what does the YouTube archive actually include?

Our team of digital media researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst collected and analyzed random samples of YouTube videos to learn more about that archive. We published an 85-page paper about that dataset and set up a website called TubeStats for researchers and journalists who need basic information about YouTube.

Now, we’re taking a closer look at some of our more surprising findings to better understand how these obscure videos might become part of powerful AI systems. We’ve found that many YouTube videos are meant for personal use or for small groups of people, and a significant proportion were created by children who appear to be under 13.

Bulk of the YouTube iceberg

Most people’s experience of YouTube is algorithmically curated: Up to 70% of the videos users watch are recommended by the site’s algorithms. Recommended videos are typically popular content such as influencer stunts, news clips, explainer videos, travel vlogs and video game reviews, while content that is not recommended languishes in obscurity.

Some YouTube content emulates popular creators or fits into established genres, but much of it is personal: family celebrations, selfies set to music, homework assignments, video game clips without context and kids dancing. The obscure side of YouTube – the vast majority of the estimated 14.8 billion videos created and uploaded to the platform – is poorly understood .

Illuminating this aspect of YouTube – and social media generally – is difficult because big tech companies have become increasingly hostile to researchers .

We’ve found that many videos on YouTube were never meant to be shared widely. We documented thousands of short, personal videos that have few views but high engagement – likes and comments – implying a small but highly engaged audience. These were clearly meant for a small audience of friends and family. Such social uses of YouTube contrast with videos that try to maximize their audience, suggesting another way to use YouTube: as a video-centered social network for small groups.

Other videos seem intended for a different kind of small, fixed audience: recorded classes from pandemic-era virtual instruction, school board meetings and work meetings. While not what most people think of as social uses, they likewise imply that their creators have a different expectation about the audience for the videos than creators of the kind of content people see in their recommendations.

Fuel for the AI machine

It was with this broader understanding that we read The New York Times exposé on how OpenAI and Google turned to YouTube in a race to find new troves of data to train their large language models. An archive of YouTube transcripts makes an extraordinary dataset for text-based models.

There is also speculation, fueled in part by an evasive answer from OpenAI’s chief technology officer Mira Murati, that the videos themselves could be used to train AI text-to-video models such as OpenAI’s Sora .

The New York Times story raised concerns about YouTube’s terms of service and, of course, the copyright issues that pervade much of the debate about AI. But there’s another problem: How could anyone know what an archive of more than 14 billion videos, uploaded by people all over the world, actually contains? It’s not entirely clear that Google knows or even could know if it wanted to.

Kids as content creators

We were surprised to find an unsettling number of videos featuring kids or apparently created by them. YouTube requires uploaders to be at least 13 years old , but we frequently saw children who appeared to be much younger than that, typically dancing, singing or playing video games.

In our preliminary research, our coders determined nearly a fifth of random videos with at least one person’s face visible likely included someone under 13. We didn’t take into account videos that were clearly shot with the consent of a parent or guardian.

Our current sample size of 250 is relatively small – we are working on coding a much larger sample – but the findings thus far are consistent with what we’ve seen in the past. We’re not aiming to scold Google. Age validation on the internet is infamously difficult and fraught , and we have no way of determining whether these videos were uploaded with the consent of a parent or guardian. But we want to underscore what is being ingested by these large companies’ AI models.

Small reach, big influence

It’s tempting to assume OpenAI is using highly produced influencer videos or TV newscasts posted to the platform to train its models, but previous research on large language model training data shows that the most popular content is not always the most influential in training AI models. A virtually unwatched conversation between three friends could have much more linguistic value in training a chatbot language model than a music video with millions of views.

Unfortunately, OpenAI and other AI companies are quite opaque about their training materials: They don’t specify what goes in and what doesn’t. Most of the time, researchers can infer problems with training data through biases in AI systems’ output. But when we do get a glimpse at training data, there’s often cause for concern. For example, Human Rights Watch released a report on June 10, 2024, that showed that a popular training dataset includes many photos of identifiable kids.

The history of big tech self-regulation is filled with moving goal posts. OpenAI in particular is notorious for asking for forgiveness rather than permission and has faced increasing criticism for putting profit over safety .

Concerns over the use of user-generated content for training AI models typically center on intellectual property , but there are also privacy issues. YouTube is a vast, unwieldy archive, impossible to fully review.

Models trained on a subset of professionally produced videos could conceivably be an AI company’s first training corpus. But without strong policies in place, any company that ingests more than the popular tip of the iceberg is likely including content that violates the Federal Trade Commission’s Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule , which prevents companies from collecting data from children under 13 without notice.

With last year’s executive order on AI and at least one promising proposal on the table for comprehensive privacy legislation, there are signs that legal protections for user data in the U.S. might become more robust.

Have you unwittingly helped train ChatGPT?

The intentions of a YouTube uploader simply aren’t as consistent or predictable as those of someone publishing a book, writing an article for a magazine or displaying a painting in a gallery. But even if YouTube’s algorithm ignores your upload and it never gets more than a couple of views, it may be used to train models like ChatGPT and Gemini.

As far as AI is concerned, your family reunion video may be just as important as those uploaded by influencer giant Mr. Beast or CNN.

• Social media
• Data privacy
• Large language models
• ai training
• training data

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Biden falters as Trump unleashes falsehoods during presidential debate

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Reporting by Helen Coster and Steve Holland, additional reporting by Nandita Bose, Rami Ayyub, James Oliphant, Eric Beech, Stephanie Kelly, Nathan Layne, Kanishka Singh, Moira Warburton; Writing by Joseph Ax and Andy Sullivan; Editing by Ross Colvin, Kieran Murray and Howard Goller

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Helen Coster is a U.S. Presidential Election Correspondent at Reuters, where she writes a mix of spot news, enterprise and analysis stories, with a focus on the Republican Party and conservative media. Prior to 2024 she covered the media industry for Reuters, and was also a Senior Editor on Reuters’ Commentary team. A graduate of Princeton University, she has reported from six countries, including Pakistan, India, and Greece.

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Six Takeaways From the First Presidential Debate

In a testy, personal clash, President Biden failed to ease worries about his age, Donald Trump forcefully made his case (with wild claims and exaggerations) and the moderators held their fact-checking fire.

The debate stage in Atlanta on Thursday night. Credit... Kenny Holston/The New York Times

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By Shane Goldmacher and Jonathan Swan

Shane Goldmacher reported from the debate in Atlanta, and Jonathan Swan from Washington.

• June 28, 2024

President Biden struggled through his first debate of the 2024 campaign against Donald J. Trump, meandering and mumbling through answers as the former president pressed his case for a second term with limited resistance from his rival.

They disagreed on abortion, inflation, climate change, foreign affairs and immigration. But the sharpest contrast was in their presentation.

Mr. Trump was confident and forceful, even as he let loose a stream of misleading attacks and falsehoods. Mr. Biden spoke with a hoarse and halting voice, closing his eyes occasionally to gather thoughts that sometimes couldn’t be corralled. Democratic anxiety rose by the minute. About halfway through, people close to Mr. Biden put out word that he had a cold.

Mr. Trump relentlessly hammered Mr. Biden on areas of vulnerability, sending exaggerations and embellishments — he was the “greatest” and his opponent the “worst” — flying unchecked through the audience-free CNN studio in Atlanta.

Here are six takeaways:

Biden stumbled over his words as he answered a question on the national debt.

“We’d be able to wipe out his debt. We’d be able to help make sure that all those things we need to do child care, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our health care system, making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the — with, with the Covid, excuse me. With dealing with everything we have to do with — look, if — we finally beat Medicare.” “Thank you, President Biden. President Trump.” “He was right. He did beat Medicaid, beat it to death, and he’s destroying Medicare.”

The debate exposed Biden’s biggest weakness.

Mr. Biden’s allies desperately hoped he could turn in a commanding performance to calm voters’ persistent concerns about his age.

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