When you've written a first draft, have a look back at the selection criteria for your course and think about the evidence you've given for each of the criteria. Have you covered everything?
10 tips for writing a grad school personal statement
Remember you x7569 re applying to study something new. Your statement should convince universities that you x7569 re excited to engage with new experiences based on your past experiences. Bragging about your achievements just won x7569 t do this.
Writing Your Grad School Personal Statement
So go give your personal statement another try. Think in scene. Use the five senses. And, of course, have fun with it. It 8767 s not every day you get to write about something from your own life that interests you.
Personal Statement | University of Michigan-Flint
Be sure that each of your paragraphs begin with a clear topic sentence which indicates which topics you are focusing on in that paragraph.
Personal statements are a tricky beast most of us haven 8767 t been trained to write about our own lives in a compelling, thoughtful way. Instead, we are taught the Five Paragraph Essay for most of our academic career, taught that our intro needs to end with a thesis statement, and our thesis statement needs to include the three points we wish to expand upon in the body of the essay.
Tutors at Oxford are only interested in your academic ability and potential. They want to see that you are truly committed to the subject or subjects you want to study at university but it's not enough just to say that you have a passion for something: you need to show tutors how you have engaged with your subject, above and beyond whatever you have studied at school or college. This can include any relevant extracurricular activities.
The personal statement should give concrete evidence of your promise as a member of the academic community, giving the committee an image of you as a person.
The personal statement should reflect careful consideration of the schools to which the applicant has chosen to apply. It gives applicants the opportunity to highlight experiences and reasons for their interest in the field, and allows the school's Admissions Committee to evaluate the compatibility between the values and goals of the applicant and those of the school, while maintaining and assuring diversity within the student body. Without question, well-developed personal statements have contributed to the acceptance of many applicants poorly written ones to the non-acceptance.
It sounds more professional and elegant if you use 'accomplish' rather than 'do', or 'presume' rather than 'think'. As an international applicant, it was even more difficult since English is not my native language, but there are some useful translation and synonym programs on the internet to help with this. I used Google Translate primarily, which includes a great deal of synonyms if you translate words from English to another language. But this synonym thing should be carefully performed, as using too many fancy words could make your statement sound overdone and difficult to read.
People sometimes think that there is a trick to writing a personal statement for Oxford, or that we are looking for some special secret formula, but this is not the case. Writing a personal statement for Oxford is no different from writing a personal statement for any other university. In fact it's important to remember that the same wording will be seen by all the universities you apply to and should therefore focus on the course you want to study, not the universities themselves. Please read this helpful advice from UCAS about writing your personal statement.
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