Speaker 1: Welcome to Grad Life Grind and welcome back to this series on personal statements. 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 further along in this series. 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna 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.