trying to write my grad school personal statement is making me want to go to sleep

here is what i'm supposed to write about:

-Self-Assessment of Capabilities, Career Objectives & Personal Goals
-Describe Academic Background, Professional Skills, and experience and how you have utilized them in various work and living situations
-Major events that have influenced your outlook on professional and quality of life issues
-Personal and/or professional accomplishments that illustrate your ability to master new challenges; leadership and teamwork abilities
-How your participation in Executive programs would enhance your skills and meet your aspirations for growth

YAWN

i don't know how i'm supposed to include all those things without it being a meandering mess of bullshit. also re: major events that have influenced your etc etc how personal am i supposed to get? the major "life event" that has influenced me is my father going to jail, but i don't know if that's appropriate to write about?

smoke a bowl and this is a piece of cake

try to avoid phrase "trolling for cock"

omg

do u have anything yet?

ok i will scratch "trolling for cock in the global marketplace" of my list of potential themes

i think you're on your way

i have a microsoft word document open and have typed the question in ha

Ah, grad school. Survive. Seriously.

next step: pick out some great clipart

what are you applying for?

you should make sure you write this in comic sans

otm

omg comic sans all the way.

i'm applying to an MS in finance program kerm.

also talk about yourself in 3rd person as much as possible, preferably all the time and sans pronouns, so you sound more like a machine than a gendered human.

Possible first sentence: Bell_labs is about to blow your mind with stories of personal growth.

Find an existing letter and start by modifying the points it makes. Then rewrite the entire thing.

^^^ This is how I write a program in a computer language I am unfamiliar with.

10 WANT GRAD SCHOOL
20 GOTO 10

zomg la lechera you are killing it

i aim to inspire
(i am a teacher)

don't write it to fit all those points. give them some bs story about how you've grown/matured.

right now i have most of an opening paragraph about how religious exegesis (my BA was in religious studies uses the same skills as financial analysis. "As unlikely as it seems...." etc etc blarrrrrrrrrgh

hey, that's a start! just remember to keep your confidence up.
http://www.dryidea.com/images/dryidea/home.jpg

Tell them that bell_labs has had a dry idea and it is to go to grad school.

instead of writing about exegisis, go creative: write an ode to vertical striped shirts, cropped haircuts, and 20lb wrist watches. travel the course of the metro north line and catalog your observations. research the origin of "pound it brah".

is that what you wrote your law school one about?

yup, I'll sell it to you for 50 burt bux

poor bell ;_;

writing this kind of stuff is basically my worst nightmare.

burt where can i get my hands on burt_bux

Interviewer: "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?"
Interviewee: "Celebrating the 5-year anniversary of you asking me this question."
-Mitch Hedberg

ok it's done. im reading it one more time and sending it out.
it's ~900 words...too long?

do i send a cover letter with an application? no?

At least you have bullet points to fulfil mine is :

What are your reasons for undertaking graduate study at Carnegie Mellon University?

How do your experience, your education and graduate training in E&TIM, and your future career plans relate to each other?

nah brah (xpost)

my personal statement was boring as shit and i got into both programs i applied to

My grad school personal statement was the longest thing I had written in about two years. I banged it out, idly searched online for personal statement advice, and discovered that I had broken basically every rule out there. This was followed by a crisis of confidence, painful revision, and wondering if the academic mindset was totally gone from me.

This is all to say, bell_labs, I feel ya.

I didn't send a cover letter but I have no idea if some programs expect that sort of thing.

Personal Statements!

this is brutal...

i feel like this is one of the hardest things i've ever done

and it's only 250 words min.!!

What sort of program are you applying for?

lame tip, but it might help: if you're stuck, try writing up a paragraph that follows the CCAR format (context, challenge, action, result)

library science. question is fairly open - career goals & how the program will help you achieve those goals

i'm not actually familiar with CCAR... what is it?

i think it's the fact that the question IS fairly open that makes it so challenging.

It's basically just a template for discussing examples of how you achieved a goal, usually career related, in the past. Succinctly, you discuss what the problem was (challenge), what you did to try to solve the problem (action), and your glorious success (result).

i wrote a teaching statement (write about teaching for like 1-2 pages) recently. it took me about three months. brutal.

xp - i see. i've used that fairly often in job interviews and the like.

you're right that it's the openness of the question that is the hard thing

yea. also "making it interesting so that the search committee remembers your application"

I tried to be all funny and clever and interesting in one of my grad school personal statements, and that ended up being the only place that rejected me. Advice: don't try to draw some life lesson out of the experience of being the shortest kid in school for 8 years. Unless the person who reads it was also the shortest kid in their school for 8 years, you will get rejected.

lol

For the record, in my other personal statements I made my best impersonation of what an overachieving boring asshole would write, and it worked.

Sometimes life is overwhelmingly depressing.

yea, i could write it relatively easily if i was just upfront, straightforward, and dry about it... and i imagine this might be okay.

but would this attract the level of attention necessary to make the search committee "remember my application" or paint a unique picture of me beyond the other 90% of applicants? f these online advice columns from former search committee members. they're really messing me up and making this harder than it should be

dunno about lib. science but when I read apps (for grad app or for faculty jobs) I skip all those personal statements, teaching statements, whatever. I want their letters of rec foremost, then their cv and whatever work they send me to evaluate, if any.

you just broke something inside me i think

stop worryin homey

i got so sweaty over those secondaries! dont tell me you dont even read them!

it's cold! maybe if they had funny pics I'd look at them, but otherwise everyone writes such similar bullshit that they provide little information. I figure the best they can do is give the department reason to talk to you about in an interview, should it come to that.

haha. i think with certain graduate programs, the personal statements probably don't mean much, as euler says. for a couple years i was seriously considering graduate study in philosophy, and every faculty advisor told me that the most weight is by far on writing sample (different from personal statement) + letters of recommendation. GREs and GPA are used for weeding out people, more or less, depending on the department. personal statements, for phil grad programs at least, are simply to sketch out an idea of what you want to study are aren't supposed to blow the minds of the admissions people.

tho for the library science program to which i'm applying, people actually in admissions told me that a lot of weight is placed on it. there's no writing sample and the only other stuff i have to submit are transcripts, letters of rec, and a resume. i don't even have to take the GRE b/c thankfully my college GPA was over 3.0, which is a huge relief.

it's coming along now. just started flowing out late last night and now i have something to work with.

i don't even remember what i wrote for this thing but it was probably pretty boring and i got into both library science programs i applied to so i wouldn't sweat it too hard ... which program are you applying to?

braggin 2009

backdoor braggin 2009

1) when i applied to swarthmore for undergrad (a school i wasn't that interested in), i winged off a personal statement about how i wanted to go there because none of the dudes in the brochure looked like they shaved that often and how that was something i could really get behind, being unshaven. i got in.
2) for med school i talked up my weaknesses (no research, background in lol humanities, rock band, etc), and i think that actually helped. \(°_°)/

BB09

n/a - simmons

hey, i work with a couple people in grad school there! they're studying history and archival management, i think, which is probably an overlapping program with library science to some small degree.

the personal statements are brutal because it's like "well DUH my career goal is to be a librarian," right? i wrote a few a couple months ago and had to just grit my teeth and state the obvious in as much detail as i could muster. and then people told me it needed "more emotive language," so i tried to add some of that, although i hate writing about myself and i especially hate writing about my feelings. anyway, i got into one so far, so it might work!

Wtf does 'more emotive language' mean?

Enh, everyone could always go to grad school in Canada instead, where personal statements only need to be a page long and are pretty easy to do, at least as far as humanities is concerned.

"You didn't show why you LOVE this field with all your heart! What THRILLS you about it! How you first got interested! Use examples!" I hate the form of personal statement that goes, "I have always loved reading books, so now I want a PhD in English as the natural result of my adoration of the written word," though.

I hate the form of personal statement that goes, "I have always loved reading books, so now I want a PhD in English as the natural result of my adoration of the written word," though.

yea srsly.

Enh, everyone could always go to grad school in Canada instead, where personal statements only need to be a page long and are pretty easy to do, at least as far as humanities is concerned.

but isn't this b/c with you need to provide a writing sample, too? it's pretty much the same with american programs in humanities (or phil. as my experience was), personal statements are only a page, but writing samples are expected to be 15-25 or so (and are expected to be very, very polished)

the reason that more weight is placed on the personal statement in my current situation is b/c the program isn't requiring a writing sample. tbh tho, as hard as it is writing this personal statement, it helps that it's only expected to be 250-500 words and i suppose i'd much rather write up that than slave over a 15-25 page writing sample to make it incredibly polished.

it's not making me want to go to sleep it's making me want to jump off the balcony

jesus why does my brain check out every time i have something important and the slightest bit challenging to do?

― bell_labs, Sunday, June 8, 2008 5:00 AM (2 years ago) Bookmark

^^^

can't wait til they invent mind reading machines so that when you apply to schools you just go and sit and they zap your brain and the machine decides whether or not you're fit to be accepted

fuck washing a personal statement

I dunno, writing my statements has been kinda fun (in a perverse, obsessive compulsive way).

This week, though, in which I'm going to have to start cold calling professors for reference letters, ugh, whole 'nother story.

I am going to apply for a different grad school program so I get to call the three profs that wrote me letters in March and say, "Hey, can you do that again? I promise I won't ask you a third time in February."

jesus why does my brain check out every time i have something important and the slightest bit challenging to do?

― bell_labs, Sunday, June 8, 2008 5:00 AM (2 years ago) Bookmark

― dayo, Thursday, October 7, 2010 1:37 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not a personal statement, but having to write about myself in general = urrrrgh

I guess that IS a personal statement, maybe I'll just write that

why does my brain check out every time i have something important and the slightest bit challenging to do?

Brain vapor lock may be due to your brain being asked to make choices and decisions that appear vitally important, but for which you may not have the smallest piece of useful information upon which to base those choices. It is like starting across a mine field without a map of where the mines are laid. Your mind naturally balks at starting such a hazardous exercise. Doing nothing seems safer than doing something.

The key then is to laugh it off and realize that you cannot do the task wrongly, because doing it wrongly supposes that there is a right way, and someone knows what the right way would be. They don't. The people who will be reading this will be just as clueless about the whole matter of what's right or wrong as you are!

That's an Aimless post par excellence if ever I read one

that's a great post and that kind of attitude has taken me far

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/07/15/422590257/medicine-law-business-which-grad-students-borrow-the-most