Rodriguez List for Choosing a Topic for Your Personal Statement

Choosing a topic for your personal statement is painful. It's one of the most painful things you'll have to go through when preparing for your master's applications, or any other graduate applications.

Quite often, people postpone writing a personal statement by the necessity to choose a topic. It's daunting, right?

It seems like you just can't find anything about your life worthy of putting it in a personal statement. And when you read examples of successful personal statement, it feels like the bar is set pretty high, and you need to be (at least) a national champion, have (casually) saved 10 lives, and founded and sold a business for millions of dollars - preferably all of that in the last 5 years.

I've already talked about the importance of writing a strong personal statement. Here, I will help you choose a topic for your personal statement.

When you look for help on the web, you'll often seetelling you to find what makes you 'unique,' or 'special.' That, however, is incredibly unhelpful and will only lead you to analysis paralysis.

Instead, I suggest to use a different technique called the 'Rodriguez list.'

What is the 'Rodriguez list'?

You've probably heard of Robert Rodriguez as a filmmaker. Among the movies he directed are El Mariachi, Desperado, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, and the Spy Kids franchise.

What is relevant to us in the context of personal statements is the way he approached his very first film, El Mariachi. The movie was extremely low-budget, shot for only $7,225. Yet, it became a huge success, winning the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival and multiple international awards.

Here is what Robert Rodriguez himself says about filming El Mariachi:

I just took stock of what I had. My friend Carlos, he's got a ranch in Mexico. Okay, that's be where the bad guy is. His cousin owns a bar. The bar is where there's going to the first, initial shootout. It's where all the bad guys hang out. His other cousin owns a bus line. Okay, there will be an action scene with the bus at some point, just a big action scene in the middle of the movie with a bus. He's got a pitbull. Okay, he's in the movie. His other friend had a turtle he found. Okay, the turtle's in the movie... I wrote everything around what we had, so you never had to go search, and you never had to spend anything on the movie.

(you can read the entire interview with Robert Rodriguez on the Tim Ferriss podcast)

This technique - taking the stock of what you have and dancing from there - got popular among filmmakers. Over time, making a Rodriguez list became a common practice that filmmakers do before shooting a movie: Write a list of what you have, and build a movie around it.

Now, how is it going to help you with your personal statement?

You can use the same technique to choose a topic for your personal statement.

Ask yourself: What assets do I have?

To make answering this question easier, you can ask yourself further, more specific questions. For example:

• What do you do professionally? Why do you do what you do? How and why did you choose your particular field? How did your interest in this field start?
• What are activities you've done in your field? Courses, research, seminars, conferences, competitions, internships, summer schools, conversations with mentors and other people, work projects, secondments - any form in which your professional activities manifested in your life. What have you learned from them?
• Who are the most important people in your life - both personal and professional? What have you learned from them?
• What are your plans for the future? It's OK to have more than one major plan, just make sure you know which one mean the most to you. Don't censor your dreams - just write down any professional and personal plans you may want to explore in the future.
• What is your experience, and how did it help you grow?
• Are there any gaps or discrepancies in your academic and professional record? What are the reasons for them? Is there some pattern (for instance, you started weak but then got everything in order)?
• Have you had any unusual obstacles or hardships (for example, economic, familial, or physical) in your life? How did you overcome them?
• What personal characteristics (for example, integrity, compassion, and/or persistence) do you possess that would improve your prospects for success in the field or profession? Is there a way to demonstrate or document that you have these characteristics?
• What skills have you acquired? eg for writing, languages, analytical skills, leadership, communication, managing other people/working with other people. What are the stories and examples from your life that demonstrate them?
• If you had to define the periods (steppingstones) in your life, what would they be? What led one period to another? What are the events, situations, people that define them for you?

These questions will help you take stock of your life. Start with the facts. When you finish, add your subjective experiences - what these facts meant to you.

And there you go - a list of potential topics for your personal statement. Of course, they will not be equal in terms of their potential impact on the admissions committee and their appropriateness for your application.

Choose a topic that speaks powerfully of you and to you. After all, the main purpose of the personal statement is to show the admissions committee who you are as a person and paint your portrait as someone who is ready for graduate study.