Writing an Effective Personal Statement

Joanna Buscemi, PhD, SBM Member Delegate

Personal statements are an important component of many types of applications across career stages including graduate programs, internship/postdoctoral positions and grants, but very little formalized training is focused on tips for writing successful statements. Writing an effective personal statement that presents you and your skills while also arguing for fit with a particular program, grant or position is challenging. Here are some important reminders when crafting your personal statement:

Be yourself. Reviewers read a lot of personal statements. After a while, they may all sound similar. You want to share enough about yourself and your experience that they remember you as an individual. At the same time, you don’t need to share more than what relates to the main points of your statement. Share enough to show the real you and to connect your experience with why you want to pursue this path.

Tell your story as an intentional path. Your path might not have been linear, but it wasn’t random. Talk about the steps that you took with the information you had at the time and how it led you to where you are now. Use words and phrases like “I decided to pursue…” and “I thought it was necessary to receive training in…” These phrases will present your path in a confident and decisive light.

Talk about your experiences in terms of broad skills rather than specific, minor tasks. Often, I read statements that list very specific tasks individuals have done in a research lab, and it actually ends up underselling them. For example, if you visited classrooms to gauge interest in participating in a research study, that would fall under “participant recruitment experience” and if you developed participant tracking databases or made reminder calls to participants, that would be experience with “project management-related tasks.”

Talking about your career goals is important, but how you do it is also important. You don’t want your career goals to sound so vague that you don’t know what you want to do, but you don’t want to get so specific that you open yourself up for being eliminated because your interests seem too niche.

Take the time to make sure you address fit. Whether it is fit with a graduate program, internship, postdoc or grant mechanism, make sure the fit is clear. Take the time to personalize it rather than just submitting a generic statement. Demonstrating fit usually involves describing relevant skills or experiences you have had that match with the experience you are applying for while also making a case for how a certain program or grant might extend those experiences.

Show an openness to learn. While it is important to describe your skills you’ve gained along the way, it is also important to show areas where you’d like to grow and how this program or mentor will help you to get there.

Check to make sure there are transitions in between paragraphs. Describing your path can sometimes lead to a “first I did this”, “then I did this” format that makes the narrative uninteresting. Make sure the paragraphs end with a closing that ties up that point and leads to the next.

Try to make the end of your statement call back to how it started. Often, statements might end abruptly without closing the circle. If you started the statement out talking about your experience growing up in a rural town, can you loop back to that and somehow tie it into your goals for your next steps?

Personal statements can be really important in differentiating you from other applicants, so it is important to go through an iterative editing process with a mentor or mentors to make sure that it presents you and your work in the best possible light and makes a strong argument that your experiences, skills and goals make you the absolute best fit for the program or position.