The first draft of my personal statement—concise, clear, exactly what the committee wants. Is it what I want? Not at all. Five-hundred words? More like five-hundred unheards. After reading my classmates’ peer review comments, I revisited my personal statement, telling myself “I am going to do everything my way.” Ask me about my personal statement. Basically complete. Word count: 699. I feel better now that I have gotten the words out of my system.
What I learned by revising my personal statem
ent is that I want this particular essay to be longer so that if I needed to leave out some of my expansions or cut down on my discussions about certain parts of my essay, I can play around with the order of my ideas. I also learned that this personal statement should be dynamic, as I will be applying to more than one doctoral program and their prompts will most likely vary, even slightly. Every program to which I will apply most likely wants applicants to be whole-hearted about their commitments to the program rather than just a simple copy-and-paste option to get the job done quickly. The most important aspect of writing a personal statement is saying what you mean, and meaning what you say. Be honest with yourself and be honest with others.
I have an interest in applying to doctoral programs for immunology. I have been looking into Harvard University, Tufts University, Boston University, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, John Hopkins University, and maybe even Rockefeller University. I am mostly concerned about everything else besides my personal statement—the letters of recommendation, the GRE, the resume—time is lurking up behind me faster than I can keep up with my own semester deadlines. Why am I not as concerned with my personal statement, you may wonder? My answer to you is that the new revision of my statement feels full of me with nothing left behind. I want my committees to know how much I love everything that I do, including my journey of self-discovery. At first, I may have been concerned with the 500-word limit, but I am disregarding the limit for now. I feel happier with the changes that I have made because I feel as though I am more holistically represented.
I have not signed for any doctoral program applications yet, so I cannot see any personal statement prompts; however, the prompt I used for my personal statement was one I found on Rockefeller University’s graduate school website. I found that this prompt may accurately represent what other programs will want to see answered in the form of a personal statement, so I appreciate that I was able to practice, reflect, and analyze during the writing process. I look forward to reading the comments that I receive from my other peers in the upcoming week because I want to be able to visibly monitor the difference between draft one and draft two. Even after, I will keep drafting until I am fully confident with everything that I have included in a sturdy statement. Even if that confidence in my writing means to go a little over the 500 word limit, if a limit even exists.
The Personal Essay 
I completely agree with the points you made about fearing that your essay was not detailed enough and lacked the components you feel describe your own sense of writing. I felt overall the first draft of my personal statement, I focused way too much on very short syntax that was easily digestible and sentences that were not filled with as much descriptive imagery as usual. A story of something that changed me was something I did not want to give too much imagery with because I did not know the relevance and I was just unsure of what to do. My writing style has always been to have long complex sentences which can sometimes be grammatically confusing giving rise to another reason I omitted it from my personal statement. I feel through the revisions maybe this is an approach I need to apply more in my revision. I can always cut down on the parts that seem redundant or I feel lose their purpose.
My fear now is mostly the amount of deadlines I have in the coming weeks as you stated. I have all my writing work, graduation business I need to attend to, the finishing touches of the committee process to apply to medical school, and I also need to begin applying to more jobs for my gap year. To say I am stressed is an understatement. But, all will eventually get done and maybe I can enjoy the summer right?
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Hi Yasmeen! I like the approach you are taking, to focus on writing what you want to say and forgetting the word count, so that in the end if you need to you have things that can be left out rather than stretching your ideas. It seems that the semester is coming to an end soon and there are many deadlines to meet, I don’t want to rush my personal statement because of other due dates that are coming up. I want to devote the time to the personal essay that it needs, so I think I will also write more in my draft and in the end I can always leave out some things when it comes down to limitations.
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Hi. I think that limits especially in the first draft can be put aside. In my opinion, I think that the first draft allows you to throw everything out there and then with the limit as a net, it allows you to haul in the things that describes you the best. I love the memes especially the first one. Sometimes we really don’t know our own selves and we decide to just put out everything and pray that we cover all the basis. We don’t want to come off a pompous and arrogant – someone with a huge ego. However when we ask those around us, they can usually give much clearer description, description that we rarely see. Its like right there in front of us and we ourselves are blind to the obvious. I also think that its great to have more than the limit rather than less. Better try and cut things than trying to add fluff in just to cover the remainder. Good luck in your application 🙂
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