Personal Statement
From The Unofficial Guide to Engineering
A personal statement (around 1-2 pages long) is required for most graduate admissions applications. The admissions committee will read these essays to get a feel for who you are as an applicant. While it is not the most important part of the application, it is certainly not something to disregard.
While most applications do not have spaces to list academic and extracurricular activities, your personal statement is the best place to mention relevant activities. If you have done research, you should definitely discuss your research activities in this personal statement. You may want to cover your specific projects and what you learned through these projects.
If you know what you want to focus on in graduate school, be sure to mention it in your personal statement, but leave your focus broad enough so that you can appeal to as many professors as possible. Remember, professors will be reading your applications and personal statements and recommend you for admission.
You will want to include anything you think will help you differentiate you from all the other applicants. These things may include your leadership positions, any hardships you faced, and any individual projects you worked on.
Space is definitely an issue. For online applications, most applications have a character limit. Just keep that in mind.
It is advised to show your personal statement to as many people as possible. You can never have too many eyes looking over your essay. Feel free to send your statement to faculty members you know. They can give you good tips of what the admissions committee is looking for.
When I applied for graduate school, I was advised to research professors at the schools and mention them and their projects by name. You may or may not want to do this.
While you will generally use the same statement (with a few adjustments) for each school, be really careful to send the correct statement to the correct school.
Don't forget to spell check and proofread. Your statement will reflect your writing abilities.
