Elements of the Personal Statement
A personal statement is a narrative essay. Like other essays, the point of it is to “prove”--or demonstrate the validity of–an argument. You’ll preview that argument in a thesis statement that appears in your introduction, and then support that argument throughout the body of the essay using analysis of evidence. In a personal statement, the “evidence” is stories from your past, and the “thesis” is an assertion of why you and this opportunity are the right fit for each other.
Start your introduction with an easy-to-read sentence that tells a quick story, one only you could tell, of a specific moment that happened in your life that led you to care about the kind of work you want to do in your research and in the future. Then, narrate briefly how your past experiences have led you to your present values, and what kind of future work your values make you want to do. Assert, in your thesis, how the program will help prepare you to do that future work, and how your values and future aims align with the mission of the program.
In the body of the essay, analyze a few key past experiences and explain how what happened in each one led you to pursue the next. For each experience, narrate the following:
- What you wanted to know, learn, understand, or do that led you to seek out that experience,
- How you approached learning or doing those things during the experience,
- What challenges came up during the experience,
- How you dealt with those challenges,
- What you learned from the experience,
- What new things that led you to want to know, learn, understand, or do. (This becomes the number 1 for your next past experience.)
Also explain how, altogether, they have led you to care about your proposed research and future work. Then, describe in a bit more vivid detail what that future work will look like, and what you hope to change or accomplish through it.
After that, the most important part of your statement is where you explain what you understand the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) to be and what its features are, address how various aspects of the fellowship will help you learn and develop toward that future, and paint a picture of what kind of member of the MMUF community you will be.
Getting Started on Your Personal StatementStudents often ask what aspects of their whole life story to focus on in a Personal Statement. We recommend that you begin drafting your Research Proposal first, as preparation for writing your Personal Statement. That is because the Personal Statement is, in part, designed to narrate how you came to care about the things you want to learn through your research. Getting a sense of what you would like your proposed research to be will help you to choose stories to include in your Personal Statement.
Once you’ve done so, the next step will be to do some casual, imaginative writing about the impact you’d like to have in the future–what you’d like to see change in the world, and what part you’d like to play in that. This is because another key element of the Personal Statement is to argue how your future goals are aligned with the mission of MMUF, so it will help to clarify what some of those goals are for you right now. After that, your aim is to narrow in on past stories from your life that reveal how you came to desire that future.
To identify which experiences you might address in your Personal Statement, take some time to free-write about a number of moments from your past that most directly led to your present values, your research interests, and your sense of what future work you want to do. They may be personal stories, family histories, academic experiences, extracurricular activities, or past research you’ve done. For each one, write out your thoughts in response to every one of the following prompts:
- What you wanted to know, learn, understand, or do that led you to seek out that experience,
- How you approached learning or doing those things during the experience,
- What challenges came up during the experience,
- How you dealt with those challenges,
- What you learned from the experience,
- What new things that led you to want to know, learn, understand, or do. (This becomes the number 1 for your next past experience.)