Monday, November 11, 2013

Writing a Personal Statement

One of the schools that I am applying to requires that you write a personal statement.  If you are anything like me then you may feel like you do not have anything to say.  However, if you begin asking yourself a few questions then you might find that you are a lot more intriguing than you first thought.  Now is a great time to talk about your uniqueness and try to stay away from cookie cutter responses.  You want to stand out from the pack.  This is exactly how I began my process.  I asked myself the following questions:

  • Why do I want to study Speech Language Pathology?
  • What skills or personality traits do I possess that will be useful in this field?
  • What life experiences have I had that may have contributed to my desire to study SLP?
  • What do I like about SLP?
  • When did I first become interested in SLP?
These are just a few examples of the questions I asked myself.  I also completed several career assessments and I did research on writing personal statements. Purdue OWL provides a lot of useful online resources for writing like https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/642/01/ which covers writing academic personal statements.

Lastly, I would encourage you to find someone to read over your essay and critique it honestly before you send it in.  Think of your application process like a job interview.  It is important to put your best foot forward in all that you do because you only get one shot at making a great first impression.

No comments:

Post a Comment