Admission Consulting

The personal statement is your opportunity to give the admissions committee a sense of the person behind all the grades and test scores. Many of the other applicants are likely to have similar academic credentials, but none has your particular experience, background, or outlook. A strong personal statement can set you apart from other candidates. Remember, the admissions committee is looking for reasons to accept you, and you can make a strongly favorable impression with a thoughtful, well written statement.

While it may seem to you like an afterthought or a chore to be dispensed with as quickly as possible, nothing could be further from the truth. This is your best opportunity - short of a personal interview - to convey a sense of who you are, what is important to you, and why you would be an outstanding student.

Step 1: Interview yourself
Write short answers to a bunch of the following questions. Keep track of which ideas keep popping up, and when you seem to be repeating yourself. Limit yourself to one or two paragraphs so that you can answer as many of these as possible.

* What experiences do you like talking about the most? What has been the most interesting, intriguing, and exciting part of your life – why, and what did you learn from it?
* Discuss an activity or experience that has helped you to clarify your long-term academic goals.
* Name a class or internship that you have taken to develop expertise in your major field of study.
* Describe a person who has shaped your values or beliefs.
* In five years, where do you see yourself working and what do you envision yourself doing?
* Discuss a need of society that you hope to address in your career Use statistics and other published resources to document the magnitude of the problem.
* Describe your hometown and explain its impact on your beliefs or values.
* Discuss an obstacle that you’ve had to overcome to achieve your academic goals.
* Write me a letter, and tell me everything you do, your personal history, and what matters to you.
* What do you enjoy doing?
Click here to find more Self-Interview questions

Step 2: Start writing your essay
In many ways, writing a personal statement is
1000
a 180-degree turn from what you’re used to doing in college. You have been trained to write rather staid, formal, academic papers in which you know the format and what is expected of you, and the challenge lies in researching the topic at hand. In crafting a personal statement you are the world’s leading expert on the topic, but must create the method of conveying this information to the committee.

With that very general advice in mind, here are more specific do’s and don’ts for writing a personal statement:
DO

* Write from your gut. You’re used to writing from your head. Don’t let your head make it up. Listen to your gut, and get it down.
* You can’t tell them everything. Have a few main points you want to get across, and let them find out the rest of your story in your resume, interview, letters of recommendation, and other elements of your application.
* When you decide on the main points and stories you want to tell, answer these questions: What is the point of the story you’re telling? What do you need to include to tell it well? What isn’t necessary?

DON’T

* Don’t be flowery in your prose
* Don’t refer to me/I too many times
* Don’t use this as a resume in narrative form. You should only talk about those accomplishments that are directly germane to the subject at hand. Let them find out about your other activities through the other elements of your application.
Click here to find more Do’s and Don’ts(Best tips for college admission essay writings I’ve ever seen.
Step 3: Read it
By now you should have a pretty much complete first draft of your statement. But it is far away from the end. First read through what you’ve written slowly and try to read it from someone else’s point of view. Make sure it’s easy to read and not confusing, make sure you’ve said everything you want to say and not under or oversold yourself.

Next get other people to read it, mainly your family, friends, teachers and anyone else who you think will be able to give you a good opinion. As well as checking for spelling and grammar mistakes, they will be able to tell you if they think there is anything you’ve missed out.

Also show it to head of year or career advisers, people like this will have seen a lot of statements, and have a good idea what they should sound like.

You could also get people on the internet to look at your statement, and see what they think.

Hopefully by looking at your statement again and showing to other people you should have a whole bunch of changes to make to your original statement. Before making these changes, save a copy of your original statement so you can go back to it if you need too. Keep making changes, showing people your statement, and making more changes.

By: jackyork

Technorati Tags: admission essay, college admission, college entrance essay

College admission essay format is a design to make your essay appear impressive and professional. There are some guidelines that have been set by academic authorities to make your essay have an ideal presentation. These guidelines must be followed because they will be evaluated as part of the paper.

Formatting an admission paper begins with a good header. Your admission paper will require a title page. The titled page should contain on separated lines, centered and double spaced, the title of the paper and the writer’s name. The instructor’s name and the course name are left out since this is not a work for class presentation. Most admission papers are not necessary to be started using outlines. But if you use an outline to commence the paper, the outline should be typed on the centre of the page one inch from the top and double-space the outline to fit the first line of the text. Take note that the outline should appear in short sentence form rather than in the shorter topic form. It is a skeleton of the admission paper.

Number all pages of your paper. If you use the MLA format, number all pages after the title page in the upper right hand corner, half an inch from the top. The outline pages should be number with small Roman numerals. Number the text pages with Arabic in the upper right hand corner. Begin the text one inch from the top and leave one inch margin at the bottom and sides of the paper.

You will normally be given word or page limits. Respect these limits even if you think you have something very important to write about. If you go beyond these limits, the rest of the work will be discarded.

If you are not given a particular font style, use the clear formatting. This will require a twelve point font size using times new roman.

The paper must have an introduction, a body and a conclusion. There will be so many admission essays to be viewed by instructors and if your paper fails to meet these standards, they will be nervous and may end up giving poor grades or even shoving your paper aside. Nothing should be taken with delight because there is no room for making corrections. The only available correction is that you will not be admitted into that particular college.
The requirement of typing out your paper should not be repeated. Almost all admission essays are typed out. This will allow for an easy reading of your essay. Most teachers are so obsessed about the handwritings of students. Anything boring or not visible will receive little or no attention. Take note that at times, you may even find it difficult to read what you have written.

College admission essay format has a lot of ins and outs to cater for. In researching and writing this paper, you will not only draw inspirations from library research techniques, but also ask from your teachers or get help from parents. There are different styles such as the MLA, APA, and CBE etc. It is of the student’s interest to have an insight into all these styles of writing and know what path his or her curriculum takes.

By: Sharon White

Technorati Tags: admission essay, essay format, sample essay