Writing Your Personal Statements

Your personal statement must demonstrate to the admissions committee that you have considered graduate school and their specific program seriously. It’s your opportunity to summarize your academic and research experiences. You must also communicate how your experiences are relevant to preparing you for the graduate degree that you will be pursuing and explain why a given program is the right one for you.

The personal statement is where you highlight your strengths. Make your strengths absolutely clear to the reviewers, because they will often be reading many other statements. Your self-assessments and honest conversations with peers and advisors should have also revealed your strengths. But you must also address (not blame others for) weaknesses or unusual aspects of your application or academic background.

Your personal statement should focus on two main aspects: your competence and commitment.

1. Regarding your competence, identify your strengths that demonstrate you are able to succeed in the grad program and provide examples to support your claims. Start your statement by describing your strengths immediately. Because faculty will be reading many statements, it’s important to start off with your strengths and not “bury your lede.” Consider traits of successful graduate students from your informational interviews, and identify which of these traits you have. These traits could involve research skills and experiences, expertise in working with techniques or instruments, familiarity with professional networks and resources in your field, etc.

Check your responses from the exercises in the self-assessment section. You may wish to consult notes from your informational interviews. Write concise summaries and stories that demonstrate your strengths, e.g., how your strengths helped you to achieve certain goals or overcome obstacles.
Summarize your research experience(s). What were the main project goals and the “big picture” questions? What was your role in this project? What did you accomplish? What did you learn, and how did you grow as a result of the experience(s)?

My research examines the interplay between U.S. domestic politics and foreign policy during the Cold War. As a native New Yorker, I saw firsthand how dramatically my city changed after 9/11, which prompted my early interest in U.S. policy at home and abroad. As an undergraduate at the City College of New York, I planned to study international relations with a focus on U.S. foreign affairs. I also quickly became involved in student activist groups that focused on raising awareness about a wide range of human rights issues, from the Syrian refugee crisis to asylum seekers from Central America.

The more I learned about the crises in the present, the more I realized that I needed a deeper understanding of the past to fully grasp them. I decided to pursue a PhD in history in order to gain a clearer understanding of human rights issues in the present and to empower young student-activists like myself.

— Vannessa Velez, PhD candidate in History

Addressing weaknesses or unusual aspects

Identify weaknesses or unusual aspects in your application—e.g., a significant drop in your GPA during a term; weak GRE scores; changes in your academic trajectory, etc. Don’t ignore them, because ignoring them might be interpreted as blind spots for you. If you’re unsure if a particular issue is significant enough to address, seek advice from faculty mentors.
Explain how you’ll improve and strengthen those areas or work around your weakness. Determine how you will address them in a positive light, e.g., by discussing how you overcame obstacles through persistence, what you learned from challenges, and how you grew from failures. Focusing on a growth mindset or grit and this blog on weaknesses might also help.
Note that it’s often better to refer to these unusual aspects later in the essay to first allow a positive impression to develop.
Explain, rather than provide excuses—i.e., address the issue directly and don’t blame others (even if you believe someone else is responsible). Draft it and get feedback from others to see if the explanation is working to deliver your desired impact on the reader.
Provide supporting empirical evidence if possible. For example, “Adjusting to college was a major step for me, coming from a small high school and as a first-generation college student. My freshman GPA was not up to par with my typical achievements, as demonstrated by my improved GPA of 3.8 during my second and third years in college."
Be concise (don’t dwell on the issues), but also be complete (don’t lead to other potentially unanswered questions). For example, if a drop in grades during a term was due to a health issue, explain whether the health issue is recurring, managed now with medication, resolved, etc.

2. Regarding your commitment, explain your motivation for pursuing research and this graduate program and discipline. You might describe your passion for discovering the unknown and drive to tackle tough problems. If relevant, you could share stories where you encountered obstacles, persisted, and found novel solutions that weren’t considered before.

Descriptions of your commitment should explain why you’re passionate about this particular academic field and provide demonstrations of your commitment with stories (e.g., working long hours to solve a problem, overcoming challenges in research, resilience in pursuing problems). Don’t merely assert your commitment.
You could also share your commitment to the academic discipline, such as how you served or led discipline-related activities and communities. If appropriate, you could describe how you were involved in mentoring future generations of students or doing outreach activities to broaden participation in your field.
Additionally, identify several faculty members at the institution whose research aligns with your interests, explain why their research fascinates you, and share how you might benefit from working with them. You may also want to write about one or two things you have learned about the graduate program that make it a good fit for you.
Explain why you are applying to graduate school, as opposed to seeking a professional degree or a job. Discuss your interest and motivation for grad school, along with your future career aspirations.

I am definitely not your traditional graduate student. As a biracial (Native American and white), first-generation PhD student from a military family, I had very limited guidance on how best to pursue my education, especially when I decided that graduate school was a good idea. I ended up coming to this PhD in a very circuitous manner, stopping first to get a JD and, later, an MFA in Young Adult Literature.

With each degree, I took time to work and apply what I’d learned, as a lawyer and as an educator. Each time, I realized that I was circling around questions that I couldn’t let go of—not just because I found them to be fascinating, but because I did (and still do!) feel that my research could help to bridge a gap that desperately needs bridging. Because my work is quite interdisciplinary, I strongly feel that I wouldn’t have been able to pursue this line of research without the degrees and life experience I gained before coming to this program.

— Jamie Fine, PhD candidate in Modern Thought and Literature

Statement of Purpose: More subtle aspects

On the page, you will want to sound confident (but not arrogant), enthusiastic (but not desperate), and curious to learn (but not naive). It will indeed be challenging to balance these aspects of your statement, so plan on working through multiple drafts and asking friends for feedback on your drafts.
With later drafts, try developing an overall narrative theme. See if one emerges as you work.
Plan to work through at least 10 drafts and expect your thinking and the essay to change substantially over time.
Read drafts out loud to help you catch errors.
Think very carefully about the use of generative AI (artificial intelligence) bots, as these may lead to statements that are not authentic to your own experiences.
Expect the "you" that emerges in your essay to be incomplete, which is OK. You’re sharing a professional/scholarly slice of "you" that will continue to evolve.
Generally, avoid humor (which can often be misinterpreted) and overly emotional appeals (which can sound melodramatic), such as references to wanting to be a scholar or scientist since you were 5 years old.

The “personal” aspects of personal statements

If the prompt or question provided by the graduate program invites you to write about personal aspects (e.g., your background, lived experiences, identities, community affiliations, etc.), you’ll want to carefully consider what aspects to share, along with how to frame these disclosures. Because these prompts vary significantly, you’ll need to pay close attention to the wording and respond directly to the specific prompt or question.

If you share about these personal aspects, you may want to focus on particular qualities or attributes that helped you to achieve excellence and that are relevant for success in the graduate program. Some possible examples include developing a growth mindset, resilience, or novel perspectives from challenges that you faced through your lived experiences.
You could also share about service or leadership in activities that broaden participation in your field and enhance the learning environments of emerging scholars (e.g., outreach, mentorship, teaching, community-building events, and/or professional development activities).
If you have personal motivations for why you began pursuing your academic field (e.g., seeking equity and justice around social issues, desire to promote civil dialogue between polarized perspectives, etc.), you could share about these as well.

If your personal background, lived experiences, and/or identity or intersection of identities has affected your academic journey, shaped your research interests, and/or influenced your career goals, you may want to share these thoughts with the admissions committee. This will require some thought. Talking with close friends and advisers who have navigated similar paths may be helpful.

These essays can be difficult to start. Here are some tips as you work through your drafts:

First jot down some preliminary thoughts or phrases over a period of time. Don’t worry about organizing the thoughts yet. Just get them down on the page.
Talk to folks you’re close to about the essay and see what emerges, adding those ideas to the document.
Look for themes and begin organizing the essay according to those themes.
Make sure you are answering the questions you are asked to answer. Regularly go back to the specific prompt or instructions for the statement.
Edit the essay for length.
Get feedback from people you trust to ensure your writing conveys your thoughts effectively and genuinely.