Sample Personal Statement Essay For College Applications

Sample Personal Statement Essay For College Applications Jacob Imm is a communications specialist in the North Central College Office of Marketing and Communications. He has 10 years of collegiate communications experience and has worked with hundreds of college students. When you have a limited amount of space, you don’t want to give precious real estate to someone else’s words. If you find that your essay is too long, do not reformat it extensively to make it fit. Making readers deal with a nine-point font and quarter-inch margins will only irritate them. For strategies for meeting word limits, see our handout on writing concisely. For help getting started, see our handout on brainstorming. Writing an admissions essay is a chance to break off the standard five-paragraph essay as this gives you a little room to wiggle around. However, just like a five-paragraph essay, you need to wrap it up using a neat conclusion. The language used in the writing of an application essay should be formal and professional. Think about the questions we asked above and the prompt for the essay, and then write for 15 or 30 minutes without stopping. What do you want your audience to know after reading your essay? Don’t worry about grammar, punctuation, organization, or anything else. Avoid cutesy and colloquial formatting choices as they are unprofessional and immature. Furthermore, avoid humor unless you are absolutely sure of it. What is funny to you may not be funny to someone else. A college admission essay doesn’t typically require a title unless it has been specifically mentioned in the instructions. Even after confirming that your essay is as close to perfect as it can get, you need to get it closer still. Get it out and revise it again (you can see why we said to start right awayâ€"this process may take time). And, one more time, don’t write in cliches and platitudes. He has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Notre Dame and a master’s degree from Northern Illinois University. At the same time, don’t go against what you’ve written on the rest of your application. Keep the details straight, and if there’s something you want to reveal in the essay, just be sure it’s about your thoughts and feelings, not an important fact you left out elsewhere. Every doctor wants to help save lives, every lawyer wants to work for justiceâ€"your reader has read these general cliches a million times. It’s probably much more personal than any of the papers you have written for class because it’s about you, not World War II or planaria. You may want to start by just getting somethingâ€"anythingâ€"on paper. When you apply to Stanford, you apply to the university as a whole, not to a particular major, department or school. We encourage you to indicate prospective majors and career interests in the application, but please know you are not bound by these selections in any way. Both applications include essay prompts for your personal essay. In addition to the personal essay, we also require the Stanford Questions, which you can access in either application once you add Stanford University to your list of colleges. You must submit the Stanford Questions online through the Coalition or Common Application. At the end of the essay, the question that was asked should have been answered fully and in detail. Afterward, take the time to think about it before brainstorming on the different ways to answer it. While revising and reworking the drafts is more of a “global” process, this step also includes changing phrases and fixing grammar, punctuation, and style errors in the work. Not everyone is a born writerâ€"in fact, pretty much no one is. And this is why it is absolutely essential that you give yourself some time to not only finish the first draft of your essay but to edit and revise your work and even rewrite the essay again if necessary. After rewriting the essay several times, keep it away. Let it sit for a couple of hours untouched or even a whole day where the deadline isn’t close. After catching the new episode of that TV show you love or going a few chapters of the book you have been reading, go through your essay one more time. Correct any mistakes you find, but be sure not to rely on grammar and spelling checkers as they cannot put your words into context. Before penning down a word of your admission essay, it is important that you understand the question and what it expects from you.