Read: Preparing for Your Personal Statement Assignment
Preparing for Your Personal Statement Assignment
A personal statement is, as the name implies, personal. It is a written introduction about you. Just like your resume, it is a marketing tool that highlights what you have accomplished and how you might contribute to and fit in the organization/company/institution reviewing your statement. Unlike your resume, however, it is not the place to list everything you have done. Rather, it is your opportunity to tell your story and highlight your most important experiences and strengths in a distinctive and memorable way. You will want to focus on your achievements, impact, and the outcomes of your experiences in your personal statement with the intent of demonstrating the significance and communicating the meaning of what you have described.
There are many websites addressing the content and approaches to writing personal statements. The advice provided by these sites can be summarized generally as follows.
- Focus on achievements; highlight successes
- Tell a good story that demonstrates your strengths
- use succinct anecdotes that include specific examples/compelling details
- choose the right experiences - there's no room for all of them - contemplate what will make you stand out - what's distinctive
- outline the steps you took to solve a problem, the benefit to others, or the ability to overcome an obstacle
- make the significance/impact evident
- Be honest and authentic
In addition to good content, be sure to:
- Use active voice - make verbs active, not passive (I worked instead of I have worked)
- Use words like I, me, and myself, sparingly
- Use good sentence structure and grammar
- Eliminate unnecessary words and redundancy
- Avoid cliche statements
- Proof-read your work more than once
For this assignment, you will only be composing one paragraph that could be used in a personal statement for employment or admission into a graduate or professional school program. The objective is to highlight the strengths/competencies you demonstrated as a UTA that most clearly substantiate your career or graduate/professional school readiness.
Keep in mind that personal statements are not "one size fits all" documents. They need to be customized for the intended purpose and audience. There may be times when it may be more appropriate than others to include a paragraph related to your UTA experience in your personal statement. Creating one while it is a fresh experience is likely to be easier than doing it some time in the future when the details are not as easy to recall. So, even if you don't use this statement in any near term versions of your personal statement, you will have it in your files. Keeping a master copy of potential information to be included in various iterations of your personal statement and your resume can be a time saver.