Speaker 1: Welcome to Grad Life Grind, and welcome to this series on personal statements. In this video, I'm going to share with you what a personal statement is. And if you stick with this series, you'll learn my tips for writing a strong and compelling personal statement for grad school applications. Right after this short intro, I'm going to share my overview of personal statements. Welcome to Grad Life Grind. If you're new to this channel, thank you for checking it out. And if you're already a subscriber, thanks for being back again. My name is Arielle, and I'm a PhD student in clinical psychology. And in this channel, I bring you information about the mental health field and talk about my journey as a PhD student. What is a personal statement? You may be asked to write a personal statement for your grad school applications, or even an application for a grant or some other research project. A personal statement is essentially an essay all about you and who you are. If you're applying to graduate programs in clinical psychology like I did, you may also be asked to write a statement of purpose, which is much more focused on your research goals and your academic achievements. The personal statement, as it sounds, is personal. It's your opportunity to tell a narrative or a story about who you are, share more of your personal experiences, and it helps you stick out. Some programs you may apply to may provide a prompt for the personal statement that you need to address in your essay. Sometimes it's a lot less structured, and you're just asked to write a personal essay about yourself. So like I said, this is a narrative or a story about who you are and what you stand for, why you're pursuing this degree or this program, and the personal factors that may have contributed to that decision. So this is not your opportunity to repeat what is on your CV or resume. This is your opportunity to share what's not on there. What about you is not on paper that you can bring to life using the personal statement. Now that you know what a personal statement is, I'm sure you have tons of questions like, why does this matter? Why is the personal statement such a big part of my application? What do I include, and how do I write a strong statement? In this video, I'm going to be covering my top general tips for writing a good personal statement. And there's so much more to come in terms of tips that I have for the writing process. Before I get into the tips, I want to make sure that you are subscribed to my channel so that you can get all the information you need about applying to graduate school and what grad school life is like. So take a quick second to subscribe to my channel, and I'll move on to the tips now. My number one tip for writing your personal statement is start early. This is a process that is very challenging, can take multiple edits. Personal statement writing is really hard because writing about yourself is never easy. You don't want to sound like you're bragging. You don't know what things to include. You don't know if it sounds too humble. So this is a process that you're going to want to start super early. I would give yourself a couple of months before the deadline for your application. My next tip for personal statement writing is don't get too personal. And this one is kind of tricky because it's a gray area. You want to get personal, and you want to share who you really are, but you also want to maintain professionalism. And I applied to programs in clinical psychology. And what motivates a lot of us to pursue this field is a loved one that struggled with mental illness or our own personal struggle with mental illness. And sometimes it's really hard to frame that experience, whether it's personal or the experience of a loved one, in a way that is appropriate and isn't oversharing. In order not to get too personal, I think you should focus on what outcomes came from the experience that you're sharing. So you don't need to go into too much detail about a person who you knew who experienced mental illness and what they had and what medication they were on and what doctor they went to and how hard it was for them and how hard it was for you. You can briefly mention, I have a loved one who struggled with bipolar disorder, and what I learned from that experience was whatever. So it's not clear cut for everyone. And like I said, you do want to share important things that affected your life. But one way that you can potentially avoid getting too personal is by leaving out the details that might be a little bit too much. And think about who's going to be reading this. If there are professors or program directors that are reading this, think about why they are reading it to learn about you. If you minimize detail, you can maximize on what you learned from it, how you grew from it. And that's what's really going to matter to the people who are reading this statement. And on that note, even though it's a personal statement, you want to make sure that you're using professional language. You're not writing this to a friend. It is not a letter. It's an important and formal statement about who you are. So make sure that you're using professional language and writing in an academic way about yourself. So this is again, pretty tricky because you want to write professionally about your personal life. So like I said, that's why it's important to start early. Another important general rule to follow when you're writing your personal statement is to be honest. You want to be forthcoming about the things that you're writing about because the things that you include on your personal statement may come up if you get offered an interview. And if you're not telling the truth, then that's not going to be a great conversation in person when the time comes. You want to be transparent, but you also want to make sure that you're not coming across too braggy. And this is a difficult balance because you do kind of want to share the accomplishments or achievements that you've had without making it sound too cocky. And I'm always going to go back to starting early because you need time to edit. If someone gives you feedback that you sound dishonest or that you sound overconfident, it really takes a lot of time. And my last general tip is if there's a prompt, make sure that you're addressing it in your personal statement. You don't want to be asked a question and then write and write and write about your personal life without answering what they're asking of you. And if there isn't a prompt, but there is other guidelines like a page limit, a number of words, or a font, you want to make sure that you're adhering to all of that too. So those are my general tips for writing a strong personal statement. If you want more detailed tips about how to start writing and how to really make your personal statement come to life, please continue watching the videos in this series. And don't forget to subscribe before you move on.