Step Four: Drafting and Refining a Personal Statement

The personal statement is a lot of work – it will probably end up being your longest essay, and it is certainly one of the most impactful ones.

  In Step Four of our 6-step sequence for Juniors, we'll be discussing what the Personal Statement is and how to draft, write, and refine your own! Visit our summary post page for 5 other guides meant to guide Juniors to college application success, from creating a college list to preparing your first full application.

The personal statement is your main essay that gets submitted to every college. This means that it's crucial to talk about something that is key to you both as a person and as an applicant - something that is close to your heart, and will also touch the hearts of admissions officers. It's an incredibly important piece for making an impact on readers whilst also defining who you are. Personal statements should be special in some way, whether it's a unique topic or a common topic addressed in a unique way. Consider the context of the rest of your application and aim for your personal statement to:

• Be unique
• Show traits central to your character
• Exhibit personal growth
• Display leadership skills
• Exude passion and intellectual vitality
• Showcase experience
• Represent changes in perspective or thought
• Demonstrate good problem solving or present problems you'd like to solve

It's no easy task to reach all of these goals, so use them more as guidelines than strict topic-choosing criteria. Moreover, ensure that you write effectively, are engaging, have good grammar, and overall create a good essay. The content might let you bake a good cake, but you still need icing to create the best package for admissions success - so get grammar edits and make sure your essay flows well. Presentation is one of the most important things in college applications, and that's especially true in your personal statement.

It’s crucial to spend ample time exploring possible topics: brainstorm, then write a bunch of different potential essays. After, find the one that resonates best with your application strategy and focus in on it. The other drafts can be used within the main essay you choose (combining multiple facets of your personality can be good!) or reapplied to college supplements later, so it’s a win-win situation to write out as many ideas as you’re able. 

Brainstorming Tips:

1. List out the most important events in your life and think about how they affected you. Which turning points were the most impactful? How did they make you into a better person? 
2. Think about what you like to do - it's much easier to write about things you have a genuine passion for than forcing a "profound" essay.
3. Consider what inspires you to apply to college in the first place: are there problems in the world you'd like to solve, or a burning passion for learning that you can show?
4. Be creative! No idea is a bad idea as long as it helps get you closer to a good end result.

When brainstorming, refer to the list of personal statement goals from the subsection above and try to think of things that can hit multiple bullets. After you've crafted a list of potential topics, it's time to see how well you can bring them to life. Try writing a little bit about each of them: this could be a hook or the intro, or even a body paragraph or the conclusion. You can also narrow down the list prior to drafting, but extra practice writing never hurts - any scrapped personal statement drafts can be reused for other supplemental essays! 

It's worth talking to some friends, teachers, family, etc. to get opinions on which topics are effective and which aren't. Some topics that might feel very important to you could feel cliché to outsiders - take advice on how to spice up your personal statement into a deep look into your individual, unique experience. 

Once you've got your topics narrowed down more, pick one (or more, if you have the bandwidth) to try writing a full draft of. It's much better to go over the word limit, since cutting down fluff and creating a more impactful essay is far preferable to needing to add fluff. Aim for at least 50~100 words over the max so you have room to work with, then begin refining.

• Consider SOAPSTone - Speaker, Occasion, Audience, Purpose, Subject, Tone. Some of these are unchanging between essays, but doing some research into your exact audience can be incredibly helpful. For example, many schools let you look up your regional AO - which makes it easier to identify what tone to use and which pop culture references might not fly (an older AO wouldn't understand a TikTok reference, but perhaps a millenial might). Thinking critically about how to effectively market yourself in essays may feel weird, but can help guide your writing.
• Stay personal. Use your writing style, talk about things that reflect who you are - although identifying the audience and potential strategies is helpful, it's never good to force yourself to write differently. Don't show off by using thesaurus.com unless you naturally speak in big words and keep your own individual voice! If your natural writing style is fairly stiff and academic, that's alright, but staying on the casual side can help essays feel more genuine and personal. 
• Ensure that your essay actually has a purpose. What story are you trying to tell? What messages would you like to convey? There should be an overarching theme or message throughout your essay that stays consistent, unless you're purposefully breaking it for an effect.
• Focus on having a cathartic ending to your personal statement. Building up an essay without having an effective conclusion or starting strong and slowly trailing off are both examples of poor writing - it's critical for your essay to not only display good traits, but also showcase a strong narrative that ends strongly.
• "Show, don't tell" is the phrase that gets thrown around everywhere, but what does it really mean? It can be as simple as swapping phrasing and subjects: between "I practiced basketball daily over the summer" and "Day in, day out, my sweat painted the sun-bleached basketball court army green", which creates a better image? The "don't tell" part can be confusing, so focusing on the "show" can be more productive - make your writing put on a show and create an image in your readers heads, one that they can decipher to understand more of who you are. Make readers think a little. In the basketball example, although both sentences make it clear that the individual practiced hard, the latter makes readers engage with the text and think about it. Both convey the same message, but one envelops a reader into the narrative - and that is the goal of effective writing.

Writing is a highly recursive process, and refining your personal statement is no different - in fact, you'll likely be going through multiple stages of refinement over months, right up until your first application deadline. You know you best, so it's easy to miss context or accidentally present something incorrectly. Getting multiple pairs of eyes from people who know you in different facets of your life is a great way to shape essays into something that admissions officers will enjoy reading. 

Continue to get outside feedback on your essay as you write, but remain fairly stubborn in sticking to your own style: grammar edits and comments about the overall essay direction are helpful, but do not lose your voice and replace it with how someone else writes. Pretend you dropped your personal statement in the hallway at school, and a past teacher picked it up - they should be able to guess that you wrote it (even assuming that your name is nowhere on the page). Have the humility to take advice, but retain the self-confidence to make your personal statement truly yours. 

Following is a real-life student example from an applicant's personal statement in 2020. The beginning of their essay addresses internal struggles with race before describing the personal growth, changed perspectives, and passion that allowed them to begin accepting their unique identity.

Original Draft:

"... it’s the stark truth of my middle school self, one tormented by not fitting in, not having a place to belong, not seeing myself in anyone. I was too brown for the white kids. I was too white for the Indian kids. I had too many cooties for the girls, even if they didn’t segregate as naturally as the boys. And I was too different to belong anywhere, at least not in those dark ages of prepubescence. 

Being half-white, half-Indian, it's always been a bit hard for me to feel a cultural background. I have the uniquely American background all children who grow up in the United States has: I had fun speaking to my parents, but their English didn't help me learn another language; I ate a lot of different kinds of cuisine, but didn't experience the everyday ethnic meals other kids did; I did fun things, but without a cultural theme. This experience of being white, being Indian, but never truly feeling like either peaked in middle school. There were things I thought were cool, things I identified with, and things I wanted to talk about with my classmates, but I was alienated- not part of the in-group anywhere, not truly anyone's friend." (205 words)

Analysis (Original):

• This student focuses greatly on illustrating their internal conflict with being mixed race, but goes a bit overboard. Some of the latter examples (listing "normal" ethnic experiences compared to the mixed race experience) may be true, but aren't unique enough to provide a deeper look into the applicant - mixed race essays are more common nowadays, so many of these points feel like reiterations of a common experience rather than a personal one. Although these may feel personal to the writer, they feel a bit generic as a reader. Going more personal and using specific examples that AOs might not hear anywhere else is more effective - higher specificity leads to more authenticity. 
• When presenting examples, the writer chose to both show and tell - overexplaining their feelings after providing enough context for readers to understand their message. This may be their natural writing style, but it's ineffective for college essays with limited word count. Cutting down to only the "show" helps strain out the descriptive fluff.
• This section's purpose is fulfilled - showing internal race struggles - but the rest of the essay doesn't have enough space to fulfill its overall purpose. Focusing so much on buildup and speaking about the past detracts from creating an effective ending and satisfying overarching narrative. 

Revised Draft:

"I was tormented by not having a place to belong. I was too brown for the white kids. I was too white for the Indian kids. At lunch, I only understood “Namaste” and that I wasn’t welcome. On the bus, I only felt alone, regardless of how hard I was being pushed into the window. Why are my glasses being stolen? Why is my Pikachu keychain being ripped apart? Why am I being texted for the amusement of exposing secrets, when everyone else has real friends? It felt my differences were at fault." (93 words)

Analysis (Revised):

• Cutting the essay in half allowed the reader to keep only the most impactful sentences and examples, focusing on building a powerful "show" with minimal "tell". Most AOs are trained on diversity and understand general race struggles, so even after removing most of the section on being mixed race, readers should still have enough knowledge to understand.
• Providing more specific examples (glasses being stolen, Pikachu keychain being ripped apart) makes the passage feel far more personal. Even the difference between saying "keychain" and "Pikachu keychain" brings a new level of authenticity - the writer clearly remembers these incidents, and recalling details allows readers to paint a stronger picture in their heads.
• This section's purpose is still fulfilled - showing internal race struggles - while doing so more concisely and strongly. This allowed the writer to focus on showing turning points in thought and personal growth throughout the rest of the essay, rather than spending half of it on their hook and personal context.

By following the writing tips and critically analyzing what's necessary to include in their essay, this writer cut down on words and made their writing more impactful overall. This change was gradual, however, over about 4 months - so remember that it's fine to take baby steps in refining your personal statement.

As one of the largest parts of any college application, it is critical for personal statements to provide a deep, well-written look into your life and motivations. It's a daunting task to sustain a longer essay with a strong narrative, but by drafting, following our writing tips, and refining your original rough draft, your personal statement will be ready for admissions success. Our summary post has all juniors need to prepare for applications, so consider giving it a read if this article was helpful! Up next is a look into planning for early applications.

Written by DB, PathIvy Content Team