Graduate School Personal Statement

1. Your personal statement convinces a faculty committee that you are qualified for
their program.
2. It convinces them that you are a good fit for their program’s focus and goals.
3. You show a select group of skills and experiences that convey your scientific
accomplishments and interests.
4. Your experiences are concrete and quantitative.
5. Your personal statement is no more than 2 pages.

Structure Diagram
Purpose

The graduate school personal statement tells your story and demonstrates that you are
a good match for a particular department or program. Matching goes both ways: they
should be interested in you, and you should be interested in them. Your personal
statement should make this match clear.

Analyze Your Audience

Your personal statement will be read by a graduate committee, a handful of faculty from
your program. They’re trying to determine if you will be a successful graduate student in
their department, a positive force in the department’s intellectual life, and a successful
scientist after you graduate. They are therefore interested in your qualifications as a
researcher, your career goals, and how your personality matches their labs and
department.

The graduate committee probably reads hundreds of applications a year. To make it

easy for them to figure out that you are a good fit, make direct, concrete statements
about your accomplishments and qualifications. To make it easy for them to remember
you, create a narrative that “brands” you.

Skills
Create a personal narrative

PhD programs invest in the professional and scientific growth of their students. Get the
committee excited about investing in you by opening your essay with a brief portrait of
what drives you as a scientist. What research directions are you passionate about, and
why? What do you picture yourself doing in 10 years?

Close your essay with a 2-3 sentence discussion of your career interests. No one will
hold you to this; this just helps your committee visualize your potential trajectory.
Describe your experiences

Experiences are the “what” of your essay. What experiences led you to develop your
skill set and passions? Where have you demonstrated accomplishment, leadership, and
collaboration? Include research, teaching, and relevant extracurriculars. State concrete
achievements and outcomes like awards, discoveries, or publications.

Quantify your experiences to show concrete impact. How many people were on your
team? How many protocols did you develop? How many people were in competition for
an award? As a TA, how often did you meet with your students?

Describe actions, not just changes in your internal mental or emotional state. A personal
statement is a way to make a narrative out of your CV. It is not a diary entry.

Vague experience Concrete experience

During this project, my mind was opened to the possibility of During this project, I collaborated with other
using different programming languages together to create group members to develop a user-friendly
code that is faster to run and easier to understand and Python wrapper for a 10,000-line Fortran
modify. library.

I showed initiative in my second project in the lab. Frustrated with the direction of my first project,
I consulted with other faculty and proposed an
entirely new project.

During my first year, I became a more curious and capable I explored the literature and proposed two
scientist. alternative procedures to make the experiment
efficient.

I won the physic department’s Laser Focus prize. I won the physics department’s prize for top
student among my cohort of 20 students.

I learned about the role of enzymes in cancer. I quantified the kinetics of three enzymes
implicated in cancer onset.

Explain the meaning of your experiences

Meaning is the “why” or “so what” of the document. Why was this experience important
to your growth as a scientist? What does it say about your abilities and potential? It
feels obvious to you, but you need to be explicit with your audience. Your descriptions
of meaning should also act as transition statements between experiences: try to “wrap”
meaning around your experiences.
 Experience only Experience and Meaning

 First year, I was vice-president.  During my undergraduate career, I

 Second year, I founded a new developed strong leadership skills.
organization. o First year…
 Third year, I partnered my o Second year…
organization with other ones. o Third year…
 Fourth year, I led a collaboration o Fourth year…
between 10 student groups.  I look forward to new leadership
challenges as a graduate student.

Demonstrate match to your target program

Demonstrate an understanding of the program to which you’re applying and about how
you will be successful in that program. To do this:

 Read the program’s website. See what language they use to describe themselves, and
echo that language in your essay. For example, MIT Biological Engineering’s
website lists the department’s three objectives.
 Get in contact with faculty (or students) in your target program. If you have had a
positive discussion with someone at the department, describe how those interactions
made you think that you and the department may be well-matched.
 State which professors in the program you would plan to work with. Show how their
research areas align with your background and your goals. You can even describe
potential research directions or projects.