What Writing a Personal Statement Can Do for You

Daria Levina

Bonus: Links to Free Samples of Successful Personal Statements Below

Most people hate writing personal statements. It's hard and tedious, right? Especially if you have to do it in a language that is not your native language. Besides, a lot of people simply cannot bear writing about themselves.

To alleviate the pressure, I decided to talk about things that writing a personal statement can do for you - positive byproducts of the process, if you will. You can see it as a flipping challenge of sorts - 'flipping' the task on its head by showing you the good side of it.

I find it important because, as much as I enjoyed working on my personal statements, I also have to acknowledge that it was, well, kind of tortuous. And really painful. I wanted to quit so many times that I had to invent this exercise to keep myself going.

For me personally, the biggest takeaway was learning to acknowledge and value my own experience. It may sound weird to you, but before I started writing personal statements for the applications I had very little understanding of the things I've done in my life. I mean, I knew them but I'd never actually processed or attributed significance to them. Having to write about my life made me think about the experiences I had really hard and truly appreciate them. It also liberated me from the fear that I didn't have anything worthy of showing to the admissions committee: I realized that I've done a ton of things that were valuable and represented who I was as a human and as a lawyer. It also helped me understand that I wanted to be an academic. That clarity was really important for designing my future.

It's not just me. I see other people struggling with similar issues, such as recognizing their own experiences, planning their futures, and overcoming the resistance to write about themselves.

Here is what other applicants are saying about writing a personal statement. These are based on real examples from a book called 50 Successful Ivy League Applications Essays by Gen and Kelly Tanabe.

Writing a personal statement helped them to:

reinforce "what I [already] thought about myself: the essay made my life seem like it made a little more sense"
learn "what makes me me"
understand "the role of friendships: like most experiences ... it was neither fully appreciated nor understood until processed reflectively"
discover passion: "I learned that I do have the power to create strong words and paragraphs"
appreciate "the role of others in my achievements"
cherish previous experiences: "I had never really thought about the many diverse experiences I had participated in and at the moment did not realize how they affected my ways of thinking"
tie activities to the future and evaluate your goals
connect the dots and put your life into perspective
believing in myself / stop doubting myself; trust that you are making the right decision
embrace the past: "I had to really look within myself and see who I was"
reflect on your family: "Appreciate the values my parents instilled in us"
be thankful
have a positive attitude
learn how to transfer your personality to paper
reflect on the past 5+ years of your life
give yourself credit more than you are used to
learn to be proud of yourself
figure out your academic passions

and finally, my personal favorite: to learn that

"I'm not as boring as I thought: While I haven't experienced anything horrific or accomplished anything on a global scale, I've done a lot of small, cool things that have made differences in both my life and the lives of others."

BONUS: The book is available in the public domain, so if you are looking for examples of successful personal statement, you can read them here.