Along with GRE studying, which I discussed in a recent post, prospective graduate students will be wrapping up their application dossiers with a personal statement. These can be nerve wracking to write: applicants are balancing length requirements, worries about sounding generic, and an above-all need to be informative about one’s dossier. But never fear! Assignment Help Club has a short guide to you crank out these things.
What is it?
Also known as a statement of purpose, a personal statement attempts to give an admissions committee some idea of who you are, why you’re interested in the department’s discipline, and why you’re applying to this department in particular. In most cases, your answers to these questions will seem generic—everyone who’s applying to graduate school is fulfilling some kind of life goal!—and working in a prescribed length requirement of around 1-2 pages, it can seem very difficult to stand out.
Advice in general
As Geoff Pynn, the graduate advisor at Northern Illinois University’s philosophy program, suggests, the first rule is Hippocratic: do no harm. While it feels natural to want your application seem original or unique, the fact is that you story isn’t original if it isn’t genuinely original. And committees will know it. So avoid the impulse to overwrite your experiences; don’t talk about your childhood desire to write a dissertation Bismarck’s Kulturkampf. Be honest about your experience in the discipline, as well as your relevant academic experiences.
Don’t lock yourself in!
Applicants make this mistake in two ways: they write knowingly about specific department members whose research they’ve encountered, or they indicate rigid and narrow interests to appeal to the specific interests of the department. The first mistake stands out to admissions committees like a sore thumb and comes across as obsequious.
The second mistake is more common: applicants describe very particular, narrow interests, in an attempt to appeal to the interests of specific department members or to gesture at the applicant’s own academic seriousness. Outside of professional programs or post-doc fellowships, most departments won’t take these accounts very seriously, if only because it is very likely that your interests will change over the course of a 5-7 year program. And it’s just as advisable for the applicant, herself, to make this calculation: how will you feel signing up to work on a project when your interest in that project, or with that faculty member, will almost certainly flag and shift over the years?
Broader is better
A better strategy is to describe your research interests in broad strokes, relying on descriptions of coursework you’ve done already, and then indicate the members of the department with whom you’d look forward to working on those interests.
If you need help, we’re here
There are so many small considerations to make in a personal statement that almost anyone will benefit from some professional attention to their work. AHC offers cheap writing help for applicants with any level of language or academic expertise. We’re glad to offer inexpensive editing and comments for candidates with most complete dossiers, to help give that professional polish. And we’re just as comfortable working with applicants who are starting from a blank page. Reach out in our chat box or send us an email. We’d love to put our shoulders to the wheel of your acceptance letter.
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