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You are asked to write a Personal Statement. The prompt you will have to address is below:
"Detail below why you feel you are qualified for a scholarship. Include achievements, financial need, career goals, community involvement, and any obstacles in your life. While there is no maximum, please write at least 500-750 words."
Assist-A-Grad and its scholarship sponsors expects all essays and application materials to be the applicant’s original work. Submissions created or heavily edited by artificial intelligence tools are prohibited. Sponsors are familiar with the markers of AI-generated text and may use both manual review and detection software to identify it. Any applicant found to have submitted AI-generated material may be disqualified by the scholarship sponsor of the scholarship(s) they applied for.
Writing a Personal Statement from UC Davis Financial Aid and Scholarships (link)
Perhaps the most critical piece of many scholarship applications is the personal statement. It is often the chance for you to make the best case for why you should be given a scholarship. Personal statements allow the reader of your application to gain the strongest feel for who you are as a person, what sets you apart from other applicants, provide evidence of your intellectual and creative achievements, and show your writing ability.
Your personal statement should be treated as the equivalent of a face-to-face interview. A well-written statement adds clarity, richness, and meaning to the information collected in other parts of your application. It is also an opportunity to explain how factors outside of your school environment have enhanced or impeded your ability to maximize available academic and intellectual opportunities.
While there is no one correct way to write a personal statement, here are some tips that are universally applicable:
Start on your personal statement early.
Give yourself time to think about your topics, and carefully consider the rationale behind each question.
Be clear. Be focused. Be organized.
What might seem funny or bitingly ironic to you might not seem that way to someone who doesn’t know you. Remember that the personal statement is an opportunity for you to give a complete picture of yourself. Don’t allow clichés to speak for you.
Be reflective.
A personal statement isn’t effective simply because it chronicles difficult circumstances. Strong personal statements should show that the writer has reflected upon and learned from their past experiences and achievements. Ideally, the writer will be able to show progression towards a clear perspective of how he or she sees the world, and what direction they are headed towards in the future. An effective personal statement gives a clear sense of your personal qualities and how you have used and developed them in response to your opportunities and challenges.
Use specific examples to illustrate your ideas.
Being too vague or writing too generally will not make your personal statement memorable. Thousands upon thousands of personal statements discuss initiative, but only hundreds show initiative using concrete examples of demonstrated motivation and leadership. But examples are only one part of the equation. You also need to show how you have assigned meaning to your experiences and how you have grown from them. Prove that you have a sense of who you are, where you are going, and how you are going to use your education and your experiences to accomplish your goals. Although some events have long-term or even lifetime ramifications, it is usually better to focus on recent events because they shed more light on who you are right now.
Finally, give yourself plenty of time for revisions.
Personal statements should go through several drafts before submission. Read your writing to others, and revise for clarity in content and in style. Pay attention to rules of correct grammar and punctuation, and don’t forget to spell-check. It is also recommended that you make use of campus resources (such as teachers, counselors, college and career technicians, classmates, or friends) to gain valuable insight into how to improve your personal statement.
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