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. So let's jump right in. 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? All that's going to be covered in this series, so before you click on to the next video about why personal statements are important, please make sure that you like this video and subscribe to my channel if you haven't already. Good luck.