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College Admissions , College Essays

In addition to standardized test scores and transcripts, a personal statement or essay is a required part of many college applications. The personal statement can be one of the most stressful parts of the application process because it's the most open ended.

In this guide, I'll answer the question, "What is a personal statement?" I'll talk through common college essay topics and what makes for an effective personal statement.

College Essay Glossary

Even the terminology can be confusing if you aren't familiar with it, so let's start by defining some terms:

Personal statement —an essay you write to show a college admissions committee who you are and why you deserve to be admitted to their school. It's worth noting that, unlike "college essay," this term is used for application essays for graduate school as well.

College essay —basically the same as a personal statement (I'll be using the terms interchangeably).

Essay prompt —a question or statement that your college essay is meant to respond to.

Supplemental essay —an extra school or program-specific essay beyond the basic personal statement.

Many colleges ask for only one essay. However, some schools do ask you to respond to multiple prompts or to provide supplemental essays in addition to a primary personal statement.

Either way, don't let it stress you out! This guide will cover everything you need to know about the different types of college essays and get you started thinking about how to write a great one:

• Why colleges ask for an essay
• What kinds of essay questions you'll see
• What sets great essays apart
• Tips for writing your own essay

Why Do Colleges Ask For an Essay?

There are a couple of reasons that colleges ask applicants to submit an essay, but the basic idea is that it gives them more information about you, especially who you are beyond grades and test scores.

#1: Insight Into Your Personality

The most important role of the essay is to give admissions committees a sense of your personality and what kind of addition you'd be to their school's community . Are you inquisitive? Ambitious? Caring? These kinds of qualities will have a profound impact on your college experience, but they're hard to determine based on a high school transcript.

Basically, the essay contextualizes your application and shows what kind of person you are outside of your grades and test scores . Imagine two students, Jane and Tim: they both have 3.5 GPAs and 1200s on the SAT. Jane lives in Colorado and is the captain of her track team; Tim lives in Vermont and regularly contributes to the school paper. They both want to be doctors, and they both volunteer at the local hospital.

As similar as Jane and Tim seem on paper, in reality, they're actually quite different, and their unique perspectives come through in their essays. Jane writes about how looking into her family history for a school project made her realize how the discovery of modern medical treatments like antibiotics and vaccines had changed the world and drove her to pursue a career as a medical researcher. Tim, meanwhile, recounts a story about how a kind doctor helped him overcome his fear of needles, an interaction that reminded him of the value of empathy and inspired him to become a family practitioner. These two students may seem outwardly similar but their motivations and personalities are very different.

Without an essay, your application is essentially a series of numbers: a GPA, SAT scores, the number of hours spent preparing for quiz bowl competitions. The personal statement is your chance to stand out as an individual.

#2: Evidence of Writing Skills

A secondary purpose of the essay is to serve as a writing sample and help colleges see that you have the skills needed to succeed in college classes. The personal statement is your best chance to show off your writing , so take the time to craft a piece you're really proud of.

That said, don't panic if you aren't a strong writer. Admissions officers aren't expecting you to write like Joan Didion; they just want to see that you can express your ideas clearly.

No matter what, your essay should absolutely not include any errors or typos .

#3: Explanation of Extenuating Circumstances

For some students, the essay is also a chance to explain factors affecting their high school record. Did your grades drop sophomore year because you were dealing with a family emergency? Did you miss out on extracurriculars junior year because of an extended medical absence? Colleges want to know if you struggled with a serious issue that affected your high school record , so make sure to indicate any relevant circumstances on your application.

Keep in mind that in some cases there will be a separate section for you to address these types of issues, as well as any black marks on your record like expulsions or criminal charges.

#4: Your Reasons for Applying to the School

Many colleges ask you to write an essay or paragraph about why you're applying to their school specifically . In asking these questions, admissions officers are trying to determine if you're genuinely excited about the school and whether you're likely to attend if accepted .

I'll talk more about this type of essay below.

What Kind of Questions Do Colleges Ask?

Thankfully, applications don't simply say, "Please include an essay about yourself"; they include a question or prompt that you're asked to respond to . These prompts are generally pretty open-ended and can be approached in a lot of different ways .

Nonetheless, most questions fall into a few main categories. Let's go through each common type of prompt, with examples from the Common Application, the University of California application, and a few individual schools.

Prompt Type 1: Your Personal History

This sort of question asks you to write about a formative experience, important event, or key relationship from your life . Admissions officers want to understand what is important to you and how your background has shaped you as a person.

These questions are both common and tricky. The most common pit students fall into is trying to tell their entire life stories. It's better to focus in on a very specific point in time and explain why it was meaningful to you.

Common App 1

Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.

Common App 5

Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.

University of California 2

Every person has a creative side, and it can be expressed in many ways: problem solving, original and innovative thinking, and artistically, to name a few. Describe how you express your creative side.

University of California 6

Think about an academic subject that inspires you. Describe how you have furthered this interest inside and/or outside of the classroom.

Prompt Type 2: Facing a Problem

A lot of prompts deal with how you solve problems, how you cope with failure, and how you respond to conflict. College can be difficult, both personally and academically, and admissions committees want to see that you're equipped to face those challenges .

The key to these types of questions is to identify a real problem, failure, or conflict ( not a success in disguise) and show how you adapted and grew from addressing the issue.

Common App 2

The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?

Harvard University 7

The Harvard College Honor Code declares that we “hold honesty as the foundation of our community.” As you consider entering this community that is committed to honesty, please reflect on a time when you or someone you observed had to make a choice about whether to act with integrity and honesty.

Prompt Type 3: Diversity

Most colleges are pretty diverse, with students from a wide range of backgrounds. Essay questions about diversity are designed to help admissions committees understand how you interact with people who are different from you .

In addressing these prompts, you want to show that you're capable of engaging with new ideas and relating to people who may have different beliefs than you.

Common App 3

Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?

Johns Hopkins University

Tell us about an aspect of your identity (e.g., race, gender, sexuality, religion, community) or a life experience that has shaped you as an individual and how that influenced what you’d like to pursue in college at Hopkins.  This can be a future goal or experience that is either [sic] academic, extracurricular, or social.

Duke University Optional 1

We believe a wide range of personal perspectives, beliefs, and lived experiences are essential to making Duke a vibrant and meaningful living and learning community. Feel free to share with us anything in this context that might help us better understand you and what you might bring to our community. 

Prompt Type 4: Your Future Goals

This type of prompt asks about what you want to do in the future: sometimes simply what you'd like to study, sometimes longer-term career goals. Colleges want to understand what you're interested in and how you plan to work towards your goals.

You'll mostly see these prompts if you're applying for a specialized program (like pre-med or engineering) or applying as a transfer student. Some schools also ask for supplementary essays along these lines. 

University of Southern California (Architecture)

Princeton Supplement 1

Prompt Type 5: Why This School

The most common style of supplemental essay is the "why us?" essay, although a few schools with their own application use this type of question as their main prompt. In these essays, you're meant to address the specific reasons you want to go to the school you're applying to .

Whatever you do, don't ever recycle these essays for more than one school.

Chapman University

There are thousands of universities and colleges. Why are you interested in attending Chapman?

Columbia University

Why are you interested in attending Columbia University? We encourage you to consider the aspect(s) that you find unique and compelling about Columbia.

Rice University

Based upon your exploration of Rice University, what elements of the Rice experience appeal to you?

Princeton University

Princeton has a longstanding commitment to understanding our responsibility to society through service and civic engagement. How does your own story intersect with these ideals?

Prompt Type 6: Creative Prompts

More selective schools often have supplemental essays with stranger or more unique questions. University of Chicago is notorious for its weird prompts, but it's not the only school that will ask you to think outside the box in addressing its questions.

University of Chicago

“Vlog,” “Labradoodle,” and “Fauxmage.” Language is filled with portmanteaus. Create a new portmanteau and explain why those two things are a “patch” (perfect match).

University of Vermont

Established in Burlington, VT, Ben & Jerry’s is synonymous with both ice cream and social change. The “Save Our Swirled” flavor raises awareness of climate change, and “I Dough, I Dough” celebrates marriage equality. If you worked alongside Ben & Jerry, what charitable flavor would you develop and why?

What Makes a Strong Personal Statement?

OK , so you're clear on what a college essay is, but you're still not sure how to write a good one . To help you get started, I'm going to explain the main things admissions officers look for in students' essays: an engaging perspective, genuine moments, and lively writing .

I've touched on these ideas already, but here, I'll go into more depth about how the best essays stand out from the pack.

Showing Who You Are

A lot of students panic about finding a unique topic, and certainly writing about something unusual like a successful dating app you developed with your friends or your time working as a mall Santa can't hurt you. But what's really important isn't so much what you write about as how you write about it . You need to use your subject to show something deeper about yourself.

Look at the prompts above: you'll notice that they almost all ask you what you learned or how the experience affected you. Whatever topic you pick, you must be able to specifically address how or why it matters to you .

Say a student, Will, was writing about the mall Santa in response to Common App prompt number 2 (the one about failure): Will was a terrible mall Santa. He was way too skinny to be convincing and the kids would always step on his feet. He could easily write 600 very entertaining words describing this experience, but they wouldn't necessarily add up to an effective college essay.

To do that, he'll need to talk about his motivations and his feelings: why he took such a job in the first place and what he did (and didn't) get out of it. Maybe Will took the job because he needed to make some money to go on a school trip and it was the only one he could find. Despite his lack of enthusiasm for screaming children, he kept doing it because he knew if he persevered through the whole holiday season he would have enough money for his trip. Would you rather read "I failed at being a mall Santa" or "Failing as a mall Santa taught me how to persevere no matter what"? Admissions officers definitely prefer the latter.

Ultimately, the best topics are ones that allow you to explain something surprising about yourself .

Since the main point of the essay is to give schools a sense of who you are, you have to open up enough to let them see your personality . Writing a good college essay means being honest about your feelings and experiences even when they aren't entirely positive.

In this context, honesty doesn't mean going on at length about the time you broke into the local pool at night and nearly got arrested, but it does mean acknowledging when something was difficult or upsetting for you. Think about the mall Santa example above. The essay won't work unless the writer genuinely acknowledges that he was a bad Santa and explains why.

Eloquent Writing

As I mentioned above, colleges want to know that you are a strong enough writer to survive in college classes . Can you express your ideas clearly and concisely? Can you employ specific details appropriately and avoid clichés and generalizations? These kinds of skills will serve you well in college (and in life!).

Nonetheless, admissions officers recognize that different students have different strengths. They aren't looking for a poetic magnum opus from someone who wants to be a math major. (Honestly, they aren't expecting a masterwork from anyone , but the basic point stands.) Focus on making sure that your thoughts and personality come through, and don't worry about using fancy vocabulary or complex rhetorical devices.

Above all, make sure that you have zero grammar or spelling errors . Typos indicate carelessness, which will hurt your cause with admissions officers.

Top Five Essay-Writing Tips

Now that you have a sense of what colleges are looking for, let's talk about how you can put this new knowledge into practice as you approach your own essay. Below, I've collected my five best tips from years as a college essay counselor.

#1: Start Early!

No matter how much you want to avoid writing your essay, don't leave it until the last minute . One of the most important parts of the essay writing process is editing, and editing takes a lot of time. You want to be able to put your draft in a drawer for a week and come back to it with fresh eyes. You don't want to be stuck with an essay you don't really like because you have to submit your application tomorrow.

You need plenty of time to experiment and rewrite, so I would recommend starting your essays at least two months before the application deadline . For most students, that means starting around Halloween, but if you're applying early, you'll need to get going closer to Labor Day.

Of course, it's even better to get a head start and begin your planning earlier. Many students like to work on their essays over the summer, when they have more free time, but you should keep in mind that each year's application isn't usually released until August or September. Essay questions often stay the same from year to year, however. If you are looking to get a jump on writing, you can try to confirm with the school (or the Common App) whether the essay questions will be the same as the previous year's.

#2: Pick a Topic You're Genuinely Excited About

One of the biggest mistakes students make is trying to write what they think the committee wants to hear. The truth is that there's no "right answer" when it comes to college essays . T he best topics aren't limited to specific categories like volunteer experiences or winning a tournament. Instead, they're topics that actually matter to the writer .

"OK," you're thinking, "but what does she mean by 'a topic that matters to you'? Because to be perfectly honest, right now, what really matters to me is that fall TV starts up this week, and I have a feeling I shouldn't write about that."

You're not wrong (although some great essays have been written about television ). A great topic isn't just something that you're excited about or that you talk to your friends about; it's something that has had a real, describable effect on your perspective .

This doesn't mean that you should overemphasize how something absolutely changed your life , especially if it really didn't. Instead, try to be as specific and honest as you can about how the experience affected you, what it taught you, or what you got out of it.

Let's go back to the TV idea. Sure, writing an essay about how excited you are for the new season of Stranger Things  probably isn't the quickest way to get yourself into college, but you could write a solid essay (in response to the first type of prompt) about how SpongeBob SquarePants was an integral part of your childhood. However, it's not enough to just explain how much you loved SpongeBob—you must also explain why and how watching the show every day after school affected your life. For example, maybe it was a ritual you shared with your brother, which showed you how even seemingly silly pieces of pop culture can bring people together. Dig beneath the surface to show who you are and how you see the world.

When you write about something you don't really care about, your writing will come out clichéd and uninteresting, and you'll likely struggle to motivate yourself. When you instead write about something that is genuinely important to you, you can make even the most ordinary experiences—learning to swim, eating a meal, or watching TV—engaging .

#3: Focus on Specifics

But how do you write an interesting essay? Focus.

Don't try to tell your entire life story or even the story of an entire weekend; 500–650 words may seem like a lot, but you'll reach that limit quickly if you try to pack every single thing that has happened to you into your essay. If, however, you just touch on a wide range of topics, you'll end up with an essay that reads more like a résumé.

Instead, narrow in on one specific event or idea, and talk about it in more depth . The narrower your topic, the better. For example, writing about your role as Mercutio in your school's production of Romeo and Juliet is too general, but writing about opening night, when everything went wrong, could be a great topic.

Whatever your topic, use details to help draw the reader in and express your unique perspective. But keep in mind that you don't have to include every detail of what you did or thought; stick to the important and illustrative ones.

#4: Use Your Own Voice

College essays aren't academic assignments; you don't need to be super formal. Instead, try to be yourself. The best writing sounds like a more eloquent version of the way you talk .

Focus on using clear, simple language that effectively explains a point or evokes a feeling. To do so, avoid the urge to use fancy-sounding synonyms when you don't really know what they mean. Contractions are fine; slang, generally, is not. Don't hesitate to write in the first person.

A final note: you don't need to be relentlessly positive. It's OK to acknowledge that sometimes things don't go how you want—just show how you grew from that.

#5: Be Ruthless

Many students want to call it a day after writing a first draft, but editing is a key part of writing a truly great essay. To be clear, editing doesn't mean just making a few minor wording tweaks and cleaning up typos; it means reading your essay carefully and objectively and thinking about how you could improve it .

Ask yourself questions as you read: is the progression of the essay clear? Do you make a lot of vague, sweeping statements that could be replaced with more interesting specifics? Do your sentences flow together nicely? Do you show something about yourself beyond the surface level?

You will have to delete and rewrite (potentially large) parts of your essay, and no matter how attached you feel to something you wrote, you might have to let it go . If you've ever heard the phrase "kill your darlings," know that it is 100% applicable to college essay writing.

At some point, you might even need to rewrite the whole essay. Even though it's annoying, starting over is sometimes the best way to get an essay that you're really proud of.

What's Next?

Make sure to check out our other posts on college essays , including our step-by-step guide to how to write your college essay , our analysis of the Common App Prompts , and our collection of example essays .

If you're in need of guidance on other parts of the application process , take a look at our guides to choosing the right college for you , writing about extracurriculars , deciding to double major , and requesting teacher recommendations .

Last but not least, if you're planning on taking the SAT one last time , check out our ultimate guide to studying for the SAT and make sure you're as prepared as possible.

Alex is an experienced tutor and writer. Over the past five years, she has worked with almost a hundred students and written about pop culture for a wide range of publications. She graduated with honors from University of Chicago, receiving a BA in English and Anthropology, and then went on to earn an MA at NYU in Cultural Reporting and Criticism. In high school, she was a National Merit Scholar, took 12 AP tests and scored 99 percentile scores on the SAT and ACT.

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How to Write an Amazing Personal Statement (Includes Examples!)

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The personal statement. It’s one of the most important parts of the entire college application process. This essay is the perfect opportunity to show admissions officers who you are and what makes you stand out from the crowd. But writing a good personal statement isn’t exactly easy. That’s why we’ve put together the ultimate guide on how to nail your personal statement, complete with example essays . Each essay was reviewed and commented upon by admissions expert Bill Jack. Let’s dive in!

Related: How to write an essay about yourself  

What is a personal statement? 

A personal statement is a special type of essay that’s required when you’re applying to colleges and scholarship programs. In this essay, you’re expected to share something about who you are and what you bring to the table. Think of it as a chance to reveal a side of yourself not found in the rest of your application. Personal statements are typically around 400 – 600 words in length. 

What can I write about? 

Pretty much anything, as long as it’s about you . While this is liberating in the sense that your writing options are nearly unlimited, it’s also overwhelming for the same reason. The good news is that you’ll probably be responding to a specific prompt. Chances are you’re applying to a school that uses the Common App , which means you’ll have seven prompts to choose from . Reviewing these prompts can help generate some ideas, but so can asking yourself meaningful questions. 

Below you’ll find a list of questions to ask yourself during the brainstorming process. For each of the following questions, spend a few minutes jotting down whatever comes to mind. 

• What experiences have shaped who you are? 
• What’s special or unique about you or your life story? 
• Who or what has inspired you the most? 
• What accomplishments are you most proud of? 
• What are your goals for the future? How have you arrived at those goals? 
• If your life was a movie, what would be the most interesting scene? 
• What have been some of the biggest challenges in your life? How did you respond and what did you learn? 

The purpose of these questions is to prompt you to think about your life at a deeper level. Hopefully by reflecting on them, you’ll find an essay topic that is impactful and meaningful. In the next section, we’ll offer some advice on actually writing your essay. 

Also see:  How to write a 500 word essay

How do I write my personal statement? 

Once you’ve found a topic, it’s time to start writing! Every personal statement is different, so there’s not really one formula that works for every student. That being said, the following tips should get you started in the right direction:  

1. Freewrite, then rewrite 

The blank page tends to get more intimidating the longer you stare at it, so it’s best to go ahead and jump right in! Don’t worry about making the first draft absolutely perfect. Instead, just get your ideas on the page and don’t spend too much time thinking about the finer details. Think of this initial writing session as a “brain dump”. Take 15-30 minutes to quickly empty all your thoughts onto the page without worrying about things like grammar, spelling, or sentence structure. You can even use bullet points if that helps. Once you have your ideas on the page, then you can go back and shape them exactly how you want. 

2. Establish your theme 

Now that you’ve got some basic ideas down on the page, it’s time to lock in on a theme. Your theme is a specific angle that reflects the central message of your essay. It can be summarized in a sentence or even a word. For example, let’s say you’re writing about how you had to establish a whole new group of friends when you moved to a new city. The theme for this type of essay would probably be something like “adaptation”. Having a theme will help you stay focused throughout your essay. Since you only have a limited number of words, you can’t afford to go off on tangents that don’t relate to your theme. 

3. Tell a story

A lot of great essays rely on a specific scene or story. Find the personal anecdote relevant to your theme and transfer it to the page. The best way to do this is by using descriptive language. Consult the five senses as you’re setting the scene. What did you see, hear, taste, touch, or smell? How were you feeling emotionally? Using descriptive language can really help your essay come to life. According to UPchieve , a nonprofit that supports low income students, focusing on a particular moment as a “ revised version of a memoir ” is one way to keep readers engaged. 

Related: College essay primer: show, don’t tell  

4. Focus on your opening paragraph

Your opening paragraph should grab your reader’s attention and set the tone for the rest of your essay. In most cases, this is the best place to include your anecdote (if you have one). By leading with your personal story, you can hook your audience from the get-go. After telling your story, you can explain why it’s important to who you are. 

Related:  How to start a scholarship essay (with examples)

5. Use an authentic voice 

Your personal statement reflects who you are, so you should use a tone that represents you. That means you shouldn’t try to sound like someone else, and you shouldn’t use fancy words just to show off. This isn’t an academic paper, so you don’t have to adopt a super formal tone. Instead, write in a way that allows room for your personality to breathe. 

6. Edit, edit, edit…

Once you’re done writing, give yourself some time away from the essay. Try to allow a few days to pass before looking at the essay again with fresh eyes. This way, you’re more likely to pick up on spelling and grammatical errors. You may even get some new ideas and rethink the way you wrote some things. Once you’re satisfied, let someone else edit your essay. We recommend asking a teacher, parent, or sibling for their thoughts before submitting. 

Examples of personal statements 

Sometimes viewing someone else’s work is the best way to generate inspiration and get the creative juices flowing. The following essays are written in response to four different Common App prompts: 

Prompt 1: “Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.”

When I was eight years old, I wanted a GameCube very badly. For weeks I hounded my dad to buy me one and finally he agreed. But there was a catch. He’d only get me a GameCube if I promised to start reading. Every day I played video games, I would have to pick up a book and read for at least one hour. At that point in my life, reading was just something I had to suffer through for school assignments. To read for pleasure seemed ludicrous. Needless to say, I wasn’t exactly thrilled about this proposed agreement. But I figured anything was worth it to get my hands on that shiny new video game console, so I bit the bullet and shook my dad’s hand. Little did I know that I had just made a life-changing deal. 

At first, the required hour of reading was a chore — something I had to do so I could play Mario Kart. But it quickly turned into something more than that. To my complete and utter surprise, I discovered that I actually enjoyed reading. One hour turned into two, two turned into three, and after a while I was spending more time reading than I was playing video games. I found myself captivated by the written word, and I read everything I could get my hands on. Lord of the Rings , Percy Jackson , Goosebumps — you name it. I was falling in love with literature, while my GameCube was accumulating dust in the TV stand. 

Soon enough, reading led to writing. I was beginning to come up with my own stories, so I put pen to paper and let my imagination run wild. It started out small. My first effort was a rudimentary picture book about a friendly raccoon who went to the moon. But things progressed. My stories became more intricate, my characters more complex. I wrote a series of science fiction novellas. I tried my hand at poetry. I was amazed at the worlds I could create with the tip of my pen. I had dreams of becoming an author. 

Then somewhere along the way my family got a subscription to Netflix, and that completely changed the way I thought about storytelling. My nose had been buried in books up until then, so I hadn’t really seen a lot of movies. That quickly changed. It seemed like every other day a pair of new DVDs would arrive in the mail (this was the early days of Netflix). Dark Knight, The Truman Show, Inception, Memento — all these great films were coming in and out of the house. And I couldn’t get enough of them. Movies brought stories to life in a way that books could not. I was head over heels for visual storytelling. 

Suddenly I wasn’t writing novels and short stories anymore. I was writing scripts for movies. Now I wanted to transfer my ideas to the big screen, rather than the pages of a book. But I was still doing the same thing I had always done. I was writing, just in a different format. To help with this process, I read the screenplays of my favorite films and paid attention to the way they were crafted. I kept watching more and more movies. And I hadn’t forgotten about my first love, either. I still cherished books and looked to them for inspiration. By the end of my junior year of high school, I had completed two scripts for short films. 

So why am I telling you all this? Because I want to turn my love of storytelling into a career. I’m not totally sure how to do that yet, but I know I have options. Whether it’s film production, creative writing, or even journalism, I want to find a major that suits my ambitions. Writing has taken me a long way, and I know it can take me even further. As I step into this next chapter of my life, I couldn’t be more excited to see how my craft develops. In the meantime, I should probably get rid of that dusty old GameCube. 

Feedback from admissions professional Bill Jack

Essays don’t always have to reveal details about the student’s intended career path, but one thing I like about this essay is that it gives the reader a sense of the why. Why do they want to pursue storytelling. It also shows the reader that they are open to how they pursue their interest. Being open to exploration is such a vital part of college, so it’s also showing the reader that they likely will be open to new things in college. And, it’s always fun to learn a little bit more about the student’s family, especially if the reader can learn about how the students interacts with their family. 

Prompt 2: “The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?”

I remember my first impression of Irvine: weird. It was foggy, stock-full of greenery and eucalyptus trees, and reminded me of my 5th grade trip to a “science camp” which was located in the San Bernardino mountains. Besides Irvine, that was one of the few places in Southern California where you’d find so many non-palm trees. 

Of course, perhaps my initial impression of Irvine was biased, motivated by a desire to stay in my hometown and a fear of the unknown. While that was true to an extent, Irvine was certainly still a little peculiar. The city itself was based on a “master plan” of sorts, with the location of each of its schools, parks, shops, and arguably its trees having been logically “picked” before the foundation was poured. Even the homes all looked roughly the same, with their beige, stucco walls almost serving as a hallmark of the city itself.

Thus, this perfectly structured, perfectly safe city seemed like a paradise of sorts to many outsiders, my parents included. I was a little more hesitant to welcome this. As I saw it, this was a phony city – believing that its uniformity stood for a lack of personality. My hometown, although not as flawlessly safe nor clean as Irvine, was where most of my dearest memories had occurred. From the many sleepovers at Cindie’s house, to trying to avoid my school’s own version of the “infamous” cheese touch, to the many laughs shared with friends and family, I shed a tear at the prospect of leaving my home.

Moving into the foreign city, remnants of the hostility I held towards Irvine remained. Still dwelling in my memories of the past, I was initially unable to see Irvine as a “home.” So, as I walked into my first-ever Irvine class, being greeted by many kind, yet unfamiliar faces around me, I was unable to recognize that some of those new faces would later become some of my dearest friends. Such negative feelings about the city were further reinforced by newer, harder classes, and more complicated homework. Sitting in the discomfort of this unfamiliar environment, it started to seem that “change” was something not only inevitable, but insurmountable.

As the years went on, however, this idea seemed to fade. I got used to my classes and bike racing through Irvine neighborhoods with my friends, watching the trees that once seemed just a “weird” green blob soon transform into one of my favorite parts of the city. While I kept my old, beloved memories stored, I made space for new ones. From carefully making our way over the narrow creek path next to our school, to the laughs we shared during chemistry class, my new memories made with friends seemed to transform a city I once disliked into one I would miss. 

Through this transformation, I have come to recognize that change, although sometimes intimidating at first, can open the door to great times and meaningful connections. Although Irvine may have once seemed like a strange, “phony” place that I couldn’t wait to be rid of, the memories and laughs I had grown to share there were very real. As I move onto this next part of my life, I hope I can use this knowledge that I have gained from my time in Irvine to make the most of what’s to come. Even if the change may be frightening at first, I have learned to embrace what’s on the other side, whether green or not.

One huge plus to writing an essay that focuses on a place is that you might have it read by someone who has been there. Yet, what’s really helpful about this essay is that even if someone hasn’t been there, a picture is painted about what the place is like.  Admission officers have the hard task of really understanding what the student sees, so the use of adjectives and imagery can really help.  It’s also really clever to see that the green that’s mentioned at the beginning is mentioned at the end.  It’s a nice way to bookend the essay and tie it all together.

Prompt 6: “Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more?”

I like getting lost. Not literally, of course, but figuratively. Whether it be in the story of a love song by Taylor Swift, or in the memories brought back by listening to my favorite childhood video game’s background music, I’ve always appreciated music’s ability to transport me to another place, another time, another feeling. 

Alas, I cannot sing, nor have I practiced an instrument since my middle school piano class days. So, perhaps Kurt Vonnegut was right. As he puts it, “Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician.” While I cannot speak for others, I have certainly not debunked his theory. Writing allows many, including myself, to attempt to mimic the transformative power of music – even if our singing voices aren’t exactly “pleasant.” Just as you can get lost in music, you can do so in a story. Whether it is in George Orwell’s totalitarian Oceania, or Little Women’s Orchard House, the stories outlined in novels can provide an amazing look into the lives and worlds of others, and an escape from the worries and problems of those in your own.

While I am certainly not claiming to have the storytelling abilities of the Orwells or Alcotts before me, I’ve had fun trying to recreate such transformative feelings for others. When I was nine, I attempted to write a story about a little girl who had gotten lost in the woods, only managing to get a couple pages through. As I got older, whenever I was assigned a creative writing assignment in school, I wrote about the same pig, Phil. He was always angry: in my 8th grade science class, Phil was mad at some humans who had harbored his friend captive, and in my 9th grade English class, at a couple who robbed him. 

Thus, when I heard about a writing club being opened at my school in 11th grade, I knew I had to join. I wanted to discern whether writing was just a hobby I picked up now and then, or a true passion. If it was a passion, I wanted to learn as much as possible about how I could improve. Although my high school’s writing club certainly wasn’t going to transform me into Shakespeare, I knew I could learn a lot from it – and I did. The club challenged me to do many things, from writing on the spot, to writing poetry, to even writing about myself, something that’s hopefully coming in handy right now. 

From then on, I started to expand into different types of writing, storing short ideas, skits, and more in appropriately-labeled Google Drive folders. At around the same time, I became interested in classic literature, which largely stemmed from a project in English class. We had been required to choose and read a classic on our own, then present it to the class in an interesting way. While my book was certainly interesting and unique in its own right, nearly everyone else’s novels seemed more captivating to me. So, I took it upon myself to read as many classics as I could the following summer.

One of the books I read during the summer, funnily enough, was Animal Farm, which starred angry pigs, reminiscent of Phil. I had also started going over different ideas in my head, thinking about how I could translate them into words using the new skills I learned. While the writing club helped reaffirm my interest in writing and allowed me to develop new skills, my newfound affinity for classics gave me inspiration to write. Now, I am actually considering writing as part of my future. In this endeavor, I hope that Phil, and the music I inevitably listen to as I write, will accompany me every step of the way.

Admission officers might read 70 (or more!) essays in one day. It’s not uncommon for them to start to blend together and sound similar. This essay might not make you laugh out loud. But, it might make the reader chuckle while reading it thanks to the subtle humor and levity. Being able to incorporate a little humor into your essay (if it is natural for you to do… do not force it), can really be a great way to shed additional light into who you are. Remember, the essay isn’t merely about proving that you can write, but it should also reveal a little bit about your personality.

Prompt 5: “Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.”

I learned a lot of things during the summer I worked at Tropical Smoothie. I discovered the value of hard work. I figured out how to save money. I even mastered the art of the Mango Magic smoothie (the secret is lots of sugar). But most importantly, I learned the power of perspective. And I have Deja to thank for that. 

Deja was my shift supervisor, and one of Tropical Smoothie’s best employees. She was punctual, friendly, and always willing to lend a helping hand. She knew the store from top to bottom, and could handle pretty much any situation thrown her way. She made everyone around her better. On top of all that, she was four months pregnant! I was always impressed by Deja’s work ethic, but I gained an entirely new level of respect for her one day.

It was a Friday night, and Deja and I were working the closing shift together. It was very busy, and Deja and I were the only ones on shift. We managed to get by, but we were exhausted by the end of the evening. After wiping down the counters and mopping the floors, we closed up shop and went our separate ways. I was eager to get home. 

I walked a couple blocks to where I had parked my car. Well, it wasn’t my car actually. It was my dad’s ‘98 Chevy pickup truck, and it was in rough shape. It had no heat or A/C, the leather seats were cracked beyond repair, and the driver’s side door was jammed shut. I sighed as I got in through the passenger side and scooted over to the driver’s seat. The whole reason I was working at Tropical Smoothie was to save up enough money to buy my own car. I was hoping to have something more respectable to drive during my senior year of high school. 

I cranked the old thing up and started on my way home. But soon enough, I spotted Deja walking on the side of the road. There was no sidewalk here, the light was low, and she was dangerously close to the passing cars. I pulled over and offered her a ride. She got in and explained that she was on her way home. Apparently she didn’t have a car and had been walking to work every day. I couldn’t believe it. Here I was complaining about my set of wheels, while Deja didn’t have any to begin with.

We got to talking, and she confessed that she had been having a tough time. You would never know from the way she was so cheerful at work, but Deja had a lot on her plate. She was taking care of her mother, her boyfriend had just lost his job, and she was worried about making ends meet. And of course, she was expecting a baby in five months. On top of all that, she had been walking nearly a mile to and from work every day. The whole thing was a real eye opener, and made me reconsider some things in my own life. 

For one, I didn’t mind driving my dad’s truck anymore. It was banged up, sure, but it was a lot better than nothing. My mindset had changed. I appreciated the truck now. I began to think about other things differently, too. I started making mental notes of all the things in my life I was thankful for — my family, my friends, my health. I became grateful for what I had, instead of obsessing over the things I didn’t. 

I also gained more awareness of the world outside my own little bubble. My encounter with Deja had shown me first-hand that everyone is dealing with their own problems, some worse than others. So I started paying more attention to my friends, family members, and coworkers. I started listening more and asking how I could help. I also gave Deja a ride home for the rest of the summer. 

These are all small things, of course, but I think they make a difference. I realized I’m at my best when I’m not fixated on my own life, but when I’m considerate of the lives around me. I want to keep this in mind as I continue to grow and develop as a person. I want to continue to search for ways to support the people around me. And most importantly, I want to keep things in perspective.

Too often we can be focused on our own problems that we fail to realize that everyone has their own things going on in their lives, too.  This essay showcases how it’s important to put things in perspective, a skill that certainly will prove invaluable in college… and not just in the classroom.  Another reason I like this essay is because it provides deeper insight into the student’s life.  Sure, you might have mentioned in your activities list that you have a job.  But as this essay does, you can show why you have the job in the first place, what your responsibilities are, and more.

A few last tips

We hope these essay examples gave you a bit of inspiration of what to include in your own. However, before you go, we’d like to send you off with a few (personal statement) writing tips to help you make your essays as lovely as the memories and anecdotes they’re based off of. Without further ado, here are some of our best tips for writing your personal statements:

1. Open strong

College admissions officers read many, many essays (think 50+) a day, which can sometimes cause them to start blending together and sounding alike. One way to avoid your essay from simply fading into the background is to start strong. This means opening your essay with something memorable, whether an interesting personal anecdote, a descriptive setting, or anything else that you think would catch a reader’s attention (so long as it’s not inappropriate). Not only might this help college admissions officers better remember your essay, but it will also make them curious about what the rest of your essay will entail.

2. Be authentic

Perhaps most important when it comes to writing personal statement essays is to maintain your authenticity. Ultimately, your essays should reflect your unique stories and quirks that make you who you are, and should help college admissions officers determine whether you’d truly be a good fit for their school or not. So, don’t stress trying to figure out what colleges are looking for. Be yourself, and let the colleges come to you!

3. Strong writing

This one may seem a little obvious, but strong writing will certainly appeal to colleges. Not only will it make your essay more compelling, but it may show colleges that you’re ready for college-level essay writing (that you’ll likely have to do a lot of). Just remember that good writing is not limited to grammar. Using captivating detail and descriptions are a huge part of making your essay seem more like a story than a lecture.

4. Proofread

Last but not least, remember to proofread! Make sure your essay contains no errors in grammar, punctuation, and spelling. When you’re done proofreading your essay yourself, we would also recommend that you ask a teacher, parent, or other grammatically savvy person to proofread your essay as well.

Final thoughts 

With those in hand, we hope you now have a better sense of how to write your personal statement. While your grades and test scores are important when it comes to college admissions, it’s really your essays that can “make” or “break” your application. 

Although this may make it seem like a daunting task, writing an amazing personal statement essay is all about effort. Thus, so long as you start early, follow the advice listed above, and dedicate your time and effort to it, it’s entirely possible to write an essay that perfectly encapsulates you. Good luck, and happy writing!

Also see:  Scholarships360’s free scholarships search tool

Key Takeaways

• It may take some people longer than others to know what they want to write about, but remember that everyone, including you, has something unique to write about!
• Personal statements should be personal, which means you should avoid being too general and really strive to show off what makes you “you”
• Time and effort are two of the most important things you can put into your personal statement to ensure that it is the best representation of yourself
• Don’t forget to ask people who know you to read your work before you submit; they should be able to tell you better than anyone if you are truly shining through!

Frequently asked questions about writing personal statements 

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How to Write a Personal Statement (with Tips and Examples)

Hannah Yang

Table of Contents

What is a personal statement, 6 tips on how to write a personal statement, personal statement examples (for college and university), faqs about writing personal statements, conclusion on how to write a personal statement.

How do you tell someone who you are in just a few hundred words?

It’s certainly no easy task, but it’s one almost every college applicant must do. The personal statement is a crucial part of any college or university application.

So, how do you write a compelling personal statement?

In this article, we’ll give you all the tools, tips, and examples you need to write an effective personal statement.

A personal statement is a short essay that reveals something important about who you are. It can talk about your background, your interests, your values, your goals in life, or all of the above.

Personal statements are required by many college admission offices and scholarship selection committees. They’re a key part of your application, alongside your academic transcript, standardized test scores, and extracurricular activities.

The reason application committees ask you to write a personal statement is so they can get to know who you are. 

Some personal statements have specific prompts, such as “Discuss a period of personal growth in your life” or “Tell us about a challenge or failure you’ve faced.” Others are more open-ended with prompts that essentially boil down to “Tell us about yourself.”

No matter what the prompt is, your goal is the same: to make yourself stand out to the selection committee as a strong candidate for their program.

Here are some things a personal statement can be:

It can be funny. If you have a great sense of humor, your personal statement is a great place to let that shine.  

It can be vulnerable. Don’t be afraid to open up about hardships in your life or failures you’ve experienced. Showing vulnerability can make you sound more like a real person rather than just a collection of application materials.  

It can be creative. Candidates have got into top schools with personal statements that take the form of “a day in the life” descriptions, third-person short stories, and even cooking recipes.

Now we’ve talked about what a personal statement is, let’s quickly look at what a personal statement isn’t:

It isn’t a formal academic paper. You should write the personal statement in your natural voice, using first-person pronouns like “I” and “me,” not in the formal, objective language you would use to write an academic paper.

It isn’t a five-paragraph essay. You should use as many paragraphs as you need to tell your story instead of sticking to the essay structure you learned in school.

It isn’t a resumé. You should try to describe yourself by telling a clear and cohesive story rather than providing a jumbled list of all of your accomplishments and ambitions.

Here are our top six tips for writing a strong personal statement.

Tip 1: Do Some Serious Self-Reflection

The hardest part of writing a personal statement isn’t the actual process of writing it.

Before you start typing, you have to figure out what to write about. And that means taking some time to reflect on who you are and what’s important in your life.

Here are some useful questions you can use to start your self-reflection. You can either answer these on your own by writing down your answers, or you can ask a trusted friend to listen as you talk about them together.

What were the key moments that shaped your life? (e.g. an important friendship, a travel experience, an illness or injury)

What are you proud of? (e.g. you’re a good listener, you always keep your promises, you’re a talented musician)

How do you choose to spend your time? (e.g. reading, practicing soccer, spending time with your friends)

What inspires you? (e.g. your grandmother, a celebrity, your favorite song)

Doing this self-reflection is crucial for figuring out the perfect topics and anecdotes you can use to describe who you are.

Tip 2: Try to Avoid Cliché Topics

College application committees read thousands of personal statements a year. That means there are some personal statement topics they see over and over again.

Here are a few examples of common personal statement topics that have become cliché:

Winning a tournament or sports game

Volunteering in a foreign country

Moving to a new home

Becoming an older sibling

Being an immigrant or having immigrant parents

If you want to make a strong impression in the application process, you need to make your personal statement stand out from the crowd.

But if your chosen personal statement topic falls into one of these categories, that doesn’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t use it. Just make sure to put a unique spin on it so it still delivers something the committee hasn’t seen before.

Good writing = better grades

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Tip 3: Show, Don’t Tell

One common mistake you might make in your personal statement is to simply tell the reader what you want them to know about you, such as by stating “I have a fear of public speaking” or “I love to cook.”

Instead of simply stating these facts, you should show the committee what you’re talking about through a story or scene, which will make your essay much more immersive and memorable.

For example, let’s say you want the committee to know you overcame your fear of public speaking. Instead of writing “I overcame my fear of public speaking,” show them what it was like to be onstage in front of a microphone. Did your palms get clammy? Did you feel light-headed? Did you forget your words?

Or let’s say you want the committee to know you love to cook. Instead of writing “I love to cook,” show them why you love to cook. What’s your favorite dish to cook? What does the air smell like when you’re cooking it? What kitchen appliances do you use to make it?

Tip 4: Connect the Story to Why You’re Applying

Don’t forget that the purpose of your personal statement isn’t simply to tell the admissions committee who you are. That’s an important part of it, of course, but your ultimate goal is to convince them to choose you as a candidate.

That means it’s important to tie your personal story to your reasons for applying to this specific school or scholarship. Finish your essay with a strong thesis.

For example, if your story is about overcoming your fear of public speaking, you might connect that story to your ambition of becoming a politician. You can then tie that to your application by saying, “I want to apply to this school because of its fantastic politics program, which will give me a perfect opportunity to use my voice.”

Tip 5: Write in Your Own Voice

The personal statement isn’t supposed to be written in a formal tone. That’s why they’re called “personal” statements because you have to shape it to fit your own voice and style.

Don’t use complicated or overwrought language. You don’t need to fill your essay with semicolons and big words, unless that’s how you sound in real life.

One way to write in your own voice is by speaking your personal statement out loud. If it doesn’t feel natural, it may need changing. 

Tip 6: Edit, Edit, Edit!

It’s important to revise your personal statement multiple times in order to make sure it’s as close to perfect as possible.

A single typo won’t kill your application, but if your personal statement contains multiple spelling errors or egregious grammar mistakes, you won’t be putting your best foot forward.

ProWritingAid can help you make sure your personal statement is as clean as possible. In addition to catching your grammar errors, typos, and punctuation mistakes, it will also help you improve weaknesses in your writing, such as passive voice, unnecessary repetition, and more.

Let’s look at some of the best personal statements that have worked for successful candidates in the real world. 

Harvard Personal Statement Example

Love. For a word describing such a powerful emotion, it is always in the air. The word “love” has become so pervasive in everyday conversation that it hardly retains its roots in blazing passion and deep adoration. In fact, the word is thrown about so much that it becomes difficult to believe society isn’t just one huge, smitten party, with everyone holding hands and singing “Kumbaya.” In films, it’s the teenage boy’s grudging response to a doting mother. At school, it’s a habitual farewell between friends. But in my Chinese home, it’s never uttered. Watching my grandmother lie unconscious on the hospital bed, waiting for her body to shut down, was excruciatingly painful. Her final quavering breaths formed a discordant rhythm with the steady beep of hospital equipment and the unsympathetic tapping hands of the clock. That evening, I whispered—into unhearing ears—the first, and only, “I love you” I ever said to her, my rankling guilt haunting me relentlessly for weeks after her passing. My warm confession seemed anticlimactic, met with only the coldness of my surroundings—the blank room, impassive doctors, and empty silence. I struggled to understand why the “love” that so easily rolled off my tongue when bantering with friends dissipated from my vocabulary when I spoke to my family. Do Chinese people simply love less than Americans do?

This is an excerpt from a personal statement that got the applicant admitted to Harvard University. The applicant discusses her background as a Chinese-American by musing on the word “love” and what that means within her family.

The writer uses vulnerable details about her relationship with her grandmother to give the reader an understanding of where she comes from and how her family has shaped her.  

You can read the full personal statement on the Harvard Crimson website.

Tufts Personal Statement Example

My first dream job was to be a pickle truck driver. I saw it in my favorite book, Richard Scarry’s “Cars and Trucks and Things That Go,” and for some reason, I was absolutely obsessed with the idea of driving a giant pickle. Much to the discontent of my younger sister, I insisted that my parents read us that book as many nights as possible so we could find goldbug, a small little golden bug, on every page. I would imagine the wonderful life I would have: being a pig driving a giant pickle truck across the country, chasing and finding goldbug. I then moved on to wanting to be a Lego Master. Then an architect. Then a surgeon. Then I discovered a real goldbug: gold nanoparticles that can reprogram macrophages to assist in killing tumors, produce clear images of them without sacrificing the subject, and heat them to obliteration. Suddenly the destination of my pickle was clear. I quickly became enveloped by the world of nanomedicine; I scoured articles about liposomes, polymeric micelles, dendrimers, targeting ligands, and self-assembling nanoparticles, all conquering cancer in some exotic way. Completely absorbed, I set out to find a mentor to dive even deeper into these topics. After several rejections, I was immensely grateful to receive an invitation to work alongside Dr. Sangeeta Ray at Johns Hopkins.

This is the beginning of a personal statement by Renner Kwittken, who was admitted into Tufts University as a pre-medical student.

Renner uses a humorous anecdote about being a pickle truck driver to describe his love for nanomedicine and how he got involved in his field. You can feel his passion for medicine throughout his personal statement.

You can find Renner’s full essay on the Tufts Admissions page.

Law School Personal Statement Essay Example

For most people, the slap on the face that turns their life around is figurative. Mine was literal. Actually, it was a punch delivered by a drill sergeant at Fort Dix, New Jersey, while I was in basic training. That day’s activity, just a few weeks into the program, included instruction in “low-crawling,” a sensible method of moving from one place to another on a battlefield. I felt rather clever for having discovered that, by looking right rather than down, I eliminated my helmet’s unfortunate tendency to dig into the ground and slow my progress. I could thus advance more easily, but I also exposed my unprotected face to hostile fire. Drill sergeants are typically very good at detecting this type of laziness, and mine was an excellent drill sergeant. So, after his repeated suggestions that I correct my performance went unheeded, he drove home his point with a fist to my face. We were both stunned. This was, after all, the New Army, and striking a trainee was a career-ending move for a drill sergeant, as we were both aware. I could have reported him; arguably, I should have. I didn’t. It didn’t seem right for this good sergeant, who had not slept for almost four days, to lose his career for losing his temper with my laziness. Choosing not to report him was the first decision I remember making that made me proud.

These are the first three paragraphs of an anonymous personal statement by a Wheaton College graduate, who used this personal statement to get into a top-25 law school.

This statement describes a time the applicant faced a challenging decision while in the army. He ended up making a decision he was proud of, and as a result, the personal statement gives us a sense of his character.

You can find the full essay on the Wheaton Academics website.

Here are some common questions about how to write a personal statement.

How Long Should a Personal Statement Be?

The length of your personal statement depends on the specific program you’re applying to. The application guidelines usually specify a maximum word count or an ideal word count.  

Most personal statements are between 500–800 words. That’s a good general range to aim for if you don’t have more specific guidelines.  

Should Personal Statements Be Different for Scholarships?

Many scholarship applications will ask for personal statements with similar prompts to those of college applications.

However, the purpose of a personal statement you’d write for a scholarship application is different from the purpose of one you’d write for a college application.

For a scholarship application, your goal is to showcase why you deserve the scholarship. To do that, you need to understand the mission of the organization offering that scholarship.

For example, some scholarships are meant to help first-generation college students get their degree, while others are meant to help women break into STEM.

Consider the following questions:

Why is this organization offering scholarships?

What would their ideal scholarship candidate look like?

How do your experiences and goals overlap with those of their ideal scholarship candidate?

You can use the same personal anecdotes you’d use for any other personal statement, but you’ll have a better chance of winning the scholarship if you tailor your essay to match their specific mission.

How to Start a Personal Statement

You should start your personal statement with a “hook” that pulls the reader in. The sooner you catch the reader’s attention, the more likely they’ll want to read the entire essay.

Here are some examples of hooks you can use:

A story (e.g. When the spotlight hit my face, I tried to remind myself to breathe. )

A setting description (e.g. My bedroom floor is covered with dirty laundry, candy wrappers, and crumpled sheet music. )

A funny anecdote (e.g. When I was a little kid, my friends nicknamed me Mowgli because of my haircut. )

A surprising fact (e.g. I've lived in 37 countries .)

There you have it—our complete guide to writing a personal statement that will make you stand out to the application committee.

Here’s a quick recap: 

A personal statement is a short essay that shows an application committee who you are

Start with a strong hook that pulls the reader in

Tell a story to engage the reader 

Write in your own voice, not in a formal tone

Good luck, and happy writing!

Hannah is a speculative fiction writer who loves all things strange and surreal. She holds a BA from Yale University and lives in Colorado. When she’s not busy writing, you can find her painting watercolors, playing her ukulele, or hiking in the Rockies. Follow her work on hannahyang.com or on Twitter at @hannahxyang.

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How to write a UCAS personal statement

Writing a great personal statement

Read our guide on what it is, what to include, how to start, length and what makes a good personal statement 

Once you've decided which universities and courses to apply for, completing your application is pretty simple – until it comes to how to write your UCAS personal statement.

This guide covers everything you need to know about how to write a personal statement for university. We look at what it is and how you can start your personal statement. We've also got questions to guide you and a suggested personal statement structure you can use so you know what to put in it.

If you'd like even more resources, support and UCAS personal statement examples, you can sign up to access our personal statement hub .

What is the UCAS personal statement?

How universities use your ucas personal statement, how to start a ucas personal statement.

• Get feedback on your UCAS personal statement

The personal statement is part of your UCAS application. It's how you show your chosen universities why you'll make a great student and why they should make you an offer.

Your personal statement also helps you think about your choice of course and your reasons for applying, so you know you’ve made the right decision.

Get feedback on your personal statement

Sign up to our personal statement hub to get feedback on your draft. You'll also get access to videos, help sheets and more tips.

Sign up now

UCAS personal statement word limit

Your personal statement length can be up to 4,000 characters long. 

This may sound a lot, but it's a word limit of around 550–1000 words with spaces and only about 1 side of typed A4 paper.

You need to keep it concise and make sure it's clear and easy to read.

Applying for multiple courses

Although you can apply for up to 5 courses on your UCAS application, you can only submit 1 personal statement. So it needs to cover all your course choices.

If you really want to show your commitment to applying for different courses, we will accept a second personal statement from you to reflect your application e.g. if you are applying for Law elsewhere, but Criminology and Criminal Justice with us.

Lots of students who apply to university have achieved the basic entry requirements and many more students apply than there are places available. Admissions teams can use your UCAS personal statement to get to know you and decide why you're more suitable than other applicants.

Some universities read every personal statement and score them. Then they use them alongside your qualifications and grades to decide whether to offer you a place or interview. Other universities put less emphasis on the personal statement and use it with students who have borderline entry requirements.

Universities might refer to your personal statement again on results day if you don't get the grades you need. So a good personal statement could clinch you a uni place even if your grades aren't what you hoped for.

Starting your personal statement can seem scary when you're staring at a blank screen. But, things will seem less daunting once you start.

• Set aside some time in a place where you're comfortable and won't be disturbed. Grab a notepad or computer.
• Write down anything and everything that's influenced your decision to go to university and study your chosen subject. Jot down your skills and experience too.
• Use the questions below to guide you. Don't worry about the personal statement length at this point – you can cut things out later.

When to start your UCAS personal statement

Ideally, you want to leave yourself plenty of time – a few weeks or even months – to plan and write your personal statement.

Try not to leave it to the last minute, as tempting as this may seem when you've got so many other things to think about.

Questions to guide you

Your motivation.

• Why do you want to study at university?
• Why do you want to study this subject?
• How did you become interested in this subject?
• What career do you have in mind after university?

Academic ability and potential

• How have your current studies affected your choice?
• What do you enjoy about your current studies?
• What skills have you gained from your current studies?
• How can you demonstrate you have the skills and qualities needed for the course?
• What qualities and attributes would you bring to the course and university?

Your experience

• What work experience (including part-time, charity and volunteer work) do you have and what have you learnt from it?
• What positions of responsibility have you held? (For example, prefect, captain of a team or member of a committee)
• What relevant hobbies or interests do you have and what skills have they helped you develop?
• What transferable skills do you have, such as self motivation, team working, public speaking, problem solving and analytical thinking?

Research and reading

• How do you keep up with current affairs or news in your chosen subject?
• What journals or publications relevant to your chosen subject do you read?
• Which people have influenced you, such as artists, authors, philosophers or scientists?

Now it's time to write your personal statement using your notes. It's best to draft it on a computer, and remember to save it regularly.

You can copy and paste it into your UCAS application when you're happy with it.

Personal statement structure

While there's no set template for a personal statement, you may find it useful to follow this personal statement structure when you decide what to put in your statement.

What to include in a personal statement

• Reasons for choosing this subject(s)
• Current studies and how these relate to your chosen subject(s)
• Experiences and how these relate to your chosen subject(s)
• Interests and responsibilities and how these relate to your chosen subject(s)
• Your future after university
• Summary including why you'll make a great student

Further tips for a good UCAS personal statement

• Use information on university websites and the UCAS website. This often includes the skills and qualities universities are looking for in applicants
• Ask friends, family and teachers to remind you of activities you've participated in. They might remember your successes better than you do
• Don’t include lists in your application, like a list of all your hobbies. Focus on 1 or 2 points and talk about them in depth to show their relevance to your application
• Explain and evidence everything. It’s easy to say you have a skill, but it's better to demonstrate it with an example of when and how you’ve used it
• Avoid clichéd lines such as ‘I've always wanted to be a teacher’ as it says nothing about your motivations or experiences
• If you’re applying for a joint degree or different subjects, give equal time to each area and try to find common aspects that show their similarities
• Never lie or plagiarise another statement – you'll be caught and it could result in your application being automatically rejected
• Proofread your personal statement by reading it out loud and ask friends, family or a teacher to check it for you

Sign up to our personal statement hub

Watch videos, get top tips and download our help sheets – that's what our personal statement hub is for. It's for you to write your story, so you can show your strengths, ideas and passion to your chosen universities.

You'll also be able send us your draft, so you can get feedback and feel confident about what you've written.

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How to Write a Personal Statement That Wows Colleges

← What Is an Application Theme and Why Is It Important?

10 Personal Statement Examples That Work →

  Most of the college applications process is fairly cut and dry. You’ll submit information about your classes and grades, standardized test scores, and various other accomplishments and honors. On much of the application, your accomplishments must speak for themselves. 

The personal statement is different though, and it’s your chance to let your voice be heard. To learn more about the personal statement, how to choose a topic, and how to write one that wows colleges, don’t miss this post.

What is the Personal Statement?

Personal statements are used in both undergraduate and graduate admissions. For undergrad admissions, personal statements are any essays students must write to submit their main application. For example, the Common App Essay and Coalition Application Essay are examples of personal statements. Similarly, the ApplyTexas Essays and University of California Essays are also good examples .

Personal statements in college admissions are generally not school-specific (those are called “supplemental essays”). Instead, they’re sent to a wide range of schools, usually every school you apply to. 

What is the Purpose of the Personal Statement?

The personal statement is generally your opportunity to speak to your unique experiences, qualities, or beliefs that aren’t elsewhere represented on the application. It is a chance to break away from the data that defines you on paper, and provide a glimpse into who you really are. In short, it’s the admissions committee’s chance to get to know the real you.

So, what are colleges looking for in your personal statement? They are looking for something that sets you apart. They are asking themselves: do you write about something truly unique? Do you write about something common, in a new and interesting way? Do you write about an aspect of your application that needed further explanation? All of these are great ways to impress with your personal statement.

Beyond getting to know you, admissions committees are also evaluating your writing skills. Are you able to write clearly and succinctly? Can you tell an engaging story? Writing effectively is an important skill in both college and life, so be sure to also fine-tune your actual writing (grammar and syntax), not just the content of your essay.

Is your personal statement strong enough? Get a free review of your personal statement with CollegeVine’s Peer Essay Review.

How To a Choose A Topic For Your Personal Statement

Most of the time, you’re given a handful of prompts to choose from. Common personal statement prompts include:

• Central aspect of your identity (activity, interest, talent, background)
• Overcoming a failure
• Time you rose to a challenge or showed leadership
• Experience that changed your beliefs
• Problem you’d like to solve
• Subject or idea that captivates you

One of the questions that we hear most often about the personal statement is, “How do I choose what to write about?” For some students, the personal statement prompt triggers an immediate and strong idea. For many more, there is at least initially some uncertainty.

We often encourage students to think less about the exact prompt and more about what aspects of themselves they think are most worthy of highlighting. This is especially helpful if you’re offered a “topic of your choice” prompt, as the best essay topic for you might actually be one you make up!

For students with an interesting story or a defining background, these can serve as the perfect catalyst to shape your approach. For students with a unique voice or different perspective, simple topics written in a new way can be engaging and insightful.

Finally, you need to consider the rest of your application when you choose a topic for your personal statement. If you are returning from a gap year, failed a single class during sophomore year, or participated extensively in something you’re passionate about that isn’t elsewhere on your application, you might attempt to address one of these topics in your statement. After all, the admissions committee wants to get to know you and understand who you really are, and these are all things that will give them a deeper understanding of that.

Still, tons of students have a decent amount of writer’s block when it comes to choosing a topic. This is understandable since the personal statement tends to be considered rather high stakes. To help you get the ball rolling, we recommend the post What If I Don’t Have Anything Interesting To Write About In My College Essay?

Tips for Writing a Personal Statement for College

1. approach this as a creative writing assignment..

Personal statements are difficult for many students because they’ve never had to do this type of writing. High schoolers are used to writing academic reports or analytical papers, but not creative storytelling pieces.

The point of creative writing is to have fun with it, and to share a meaningful story. Choose a topic that inspires you so that you’ll enjoy writing your essay. It doesn’t have to be intellectual or impressive at all. You have your transcript and test scores to prove your academic skills, so the point of the personal statement is to give you free rein to showcase your personality. This will result in a more engaging essay and reading experience for admissions officers. 

As you’re writing, there’s no need to follow the traditional five-paragraph format with an explicit thesis. Your story should have an overarching message, but it doesn’t need to be explicitly stated—it should shine through organically. 

Your writing should also feel natural. While it will be more refined than a conversation with your best friend, it shouldn’t feel stuffy or contrived when it comes off your tongue. This balance can be difficult to strike, but a tone that would feel natural when talking with an admired teacher or a longtime mentor is usually a good fit.

2. Show, don’t tell.

One of the biggest mistakes students make is to simply state everything that happened, instead of actually bringing the reader to the moment it happened, and telling a story. It’s boring to read: “I was overjoyed and felt empowered when I finished my first half marathon.” It’s much more interesting when the writing actually shows you what happened and what the writer felt in that moment: “As I rounded the final bend before the finish line, my heart fluttered in excitement. The adrenaline drowned out my burning legs and gasping lungs. I was going to finish my first half marathon! This was almost incomprehensible to me, as someone who could barely run a mile just a year ago.”

If you find yourself starting to write your essay like a report, and are having trouble going beyond “telling,” envision yourself in the moment you want to write about. What did you feel, emotionally and physically? Why was this moment meaningful? What did you see or hear? What were your thoughts?

For inspiration, read some memoirs or personal essays, like The New York Times Modern Love Column . You could also listen to podcasts of personal stories, like The Moth . What do these writers and storytellers do that make their stories engaging? If you didn’t enjoy a particular story, what was it that you didn’t like? Analyzing real stories can help you identify techniques that you personally resonate with.

3. Use dialogue.

A great way to keep your writing engaging is to include some dialogue. Instead of writing: “My brothers taunted me,” consider sharing what they actually said. It’s more powerful to read something like:

“Where’s the fire, Princess Clara?” they taunted. “Having some trouble?” They prodded me with the ends of the chewed branches and, with a few effortless scrapes of wood on rock, sparked a red and roaring flame. My face burned long after I left the fire pit. The camp stank of salmon and shame. 

Having dialogue can break up longer paragraphs of text, and bring some action and immediacy to your story. That being said, don’t overdo it. It’s important to strike a balance between relying too much on dialogue, and using it occasionally as an effective writing tool. You don’t want your essay to read like a script for a movie (unless, of course, that’s intentional and you want to showcase your screenwriting skills!).

Want free essay feedback? Submit your essay to CollegeVine’s Peer Essay Review and get fast, actionable edits on your essay. 

Common Mistakes to Avoid in Personal Statements

1. giving a recap or report of all the events..

Your essay isn’t a play-by-play of everything that happened in that time frame. Only include relevant details that enrich the story, instead of making your personal statement a report of the events. Remember that the goal is to share your voice, what’s important to you, and who you are. 

2. Writing about too many events or experiences. 

Similarly, another common mistake is to make your personal statement a resume or recap of all your high school accomplishments. The Activities Section of the Common App is the place for listing out your achievements, not your personal statement. Focus on one specific experience or a few related experiences, and go into detail on those. 

3. Using cliche language.

Try to avoid overdone quotes from famous people like Gandhi or Thoreau. Better yet, try to avoid quotes from other people in general, unless it’s a message from someone you personally know. Adding these famous quotes won’t make your essay unique, and it takes up valuable space for you to share your voice.

You should also steer away from broad language or lavish claims like “It was the best day of my life.” Since they’re so cliche, these statements also obscure your message, and it’s hard to understand what you actually mean. If it was actually the best day of your life, show us why, rather than just telling us.

If you want to learn more about personal statements, see our post of 11 Common App Essay Examples .

Want help with your college essays to improve your admissions chances? Sign up for your free CollegeVine account and get access to our essay guides and courses. You can also get your essay peer-reviewed and improve your own writing skills by reviewing other students’ essays.

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The personal statement.

The Personal Statement is at the heart of most scholarship and fellowship applications and it remains one of the most challenging but rewarding written efforts that you will encounter in the scholarship process. It is, strictly speaking, your story.  It asks you to find a way to articulate who you are because of the what, why, and where.  In other words, the personal statement asks you critically reflect on how you define yourself based on your sense of self, what you value, what you are passionate about, where those passions come from and how they are both manifesting in your current experience and will likely take further shape in your future.  It compels you to drop the pretense, break through any and all previous assumptions of what defined you coming into your undergraduate experience (GPA, test scores, captain of team, etc.) and really begin to dive deep into your own authenticity. 

A strong personal statement not only tells your story, it does so in a way that is both captivating and sincere.  It is focused, clear, concise, and compelling.  In actual fact, it is probably the most difficult writing you will do as a national scholarship applicant, maybe even as an undergraduate.  It is challenging for a variety of reasons:

• A Personal Statement forces you to write in way that conflates your ‘academic voice’ with your ‘personal voice’.  After years of having your ‘personal voice’ trained out of your writing style, a Personal Statement asks you to put it back in given that you are making an effort to tell your particular story;
• A Personal Statement should reflect the level of critical reflection that has both shaped your sense of self and your sense of purpose.  Meaning, you’ve given some time and thought to the effort;
• In addition to telling at least a small part of your larger story, a Personal Statement should reflect your trajectory, detailing where you have come from and how that is shaping the next steps you plan to take;
• It requires you to think about your strengths, achievements and accomplishments and maybe even write about them.  This is perhaps one of the strangest, if not most difficult things for any ‘high-achieving’  individual who also tends to be quite humble when describing themselves;
• It requires a certain level of commitment to your future plans, even though those sitting on a review committee recognize that what you put forward as your future plans (certainly while still an undergraduate) amounts to your best, well-educated guess;
• It is short.  Most Personal Statements are a maximum of 1000 words in length or less.  That means you have to reduce (in the best sense of the word) your story to fit those requirements, hence the necessity of very clear and concise writing.  A Personal Statement does not afford you the opportunity to pad your essay with a long introduction and grand, summative conclusion.  There simply isn’t word-count enough.  So, find a way in your first two sentences to capture your readers’ attention and proceed from there.

But, all that to say, if done well and with adequate time to reflect, write long, edit, revise and refine, your Personal Statement could also be one of the most rewarding pieces of writing you engage in while a student.  It will help you not only develop a strong portfolio for your national scholarship applications; it will also guide you in your efforts toward graduate school, further professional pursuits, even job interviews.  Why? Because you have given yourself a moment to stop, think, and write about what is at the very core of you and how that has and will continue to shape who you are becoming.  If done well, your Personal Statement will be an authentic representation of yourself and will serve you in the best of ways, providing you with a kind of bell-weather as you pursue your next best thing.  In fact, with minor adjustments apropos to your developing life-story, you may find your Personal Statement remains relatively unchanged at its core.  Why? Because, chances are fairly good that your own core sense of self will remain relatively the same.  So, rise to the challenge of the Personal Statement, overcome it, and benefit from the process of thinking and writing about your most authentic self.

And, of course, remember that you have the support of the CCSA staff, who recognize the difficulty of starting to write a Personal Statement.  We all have our own ways of brainstorming and ‘priming the pump’; sometimes one of the best ways to start, is to have a good long chat with someone about what you really (really) care about, why, and where and what you hope to see all those cares move you toward.  That’s precisely what we are available to do with you – chat, listen, draw story-boards, idea webs, you name it – so, contact us to make an appointment.  There is absolutely no reason you should feel you have to tackle the Personal Statement process on your own.

Suggestions and Tips:

• Do your homework and make sure you understand the purpose of the scholarship, fellowship, or nationally competitive experiential learning opportunity for which you are applying.  This will offer some shape to the tone of your writing efforts.  It will also help you identify what is important to those who will be assessing your application and making a determination as to its outcome;
• Give yourself plenty of time to brainstorm, reflect, and really dig deep into your core.  Use whatever method best suits you to keep track of important ideas, quotes, contacts, plans, connections, dreams, and opportunities so as to have a kind of personal reference collection that will be useful in both planning for your future and crafting a Personal Statement;
• Ask yourself certain key questions, like:
• What hurts you about the world and how do hope to help alleviate that hurt?
• What do you want to be remembered for?
• What gets you about of bed in the morning?
• What are your strengths? Weaknesses? What challenges have your overcome and how have you come understand them as opportunities?
• When have you lost all sense of yourself when involved in a particular activity or experience because it came so naturally to you?
• What do you really care about and why?
• Who do you really care about and why?
• Who has inspired you? Who has helped to shape your academic experience and why? 
• Why are your studying your particular subject and how have you come understand the challenges and unique opportunities within your discipline(s)
• Where have you been in the world that has shaped your sense of self and your place in the world?
• What are your greatest dreams and how do you to intend to build/have you built the foundation from which to launch those dreams?
• What do you hope to contribute to your personal circle, to your local community, to your nation, to the world? And, how do you imagine beginning to do so.

4. Even though your final draft will likely only be 1000 words or less, write long.  You can always edit down and make your drafts tighter as your thinking and writing becomes more focused. 

5. Expect to write a number of drafts, hence the necessity of giving yourself plenty of time to think, reflect, write, and edit. Once you have a draft you are comfortable with, start to peddle it out to friends, family, peers, colleagues, and faculty mentors and advisors for further guidance and suggestions on refining your statement.  Of course, share any and all drafts with CCSA staff as they are happy to help with conceptual challenges right on down to red-lining;

6. Use other parts of your developing application portfolio – like your Curriculum Vita/CV , your project or research proposal, writing samples, research you’ve done on your programs of interest, etc. to help guide your Personal Statement (but, don’t regurgitate your CV);

7. Give examples.  There is tendency when writing about oneself to keep it in the abstract realm of ‘passions’ and ‘dreams’ but your reader needs something concrete to tack down those abstract ideas and understand them in the context of your real-life experience.  So, be specific and identify relevant antidotes that help paint a better picture of the story you are telling;

8. Give yourself plenty of time to edit, revise, spell-check, edit, revise, edit, send out for review by others, read aloud, edit, revise, set the document aside for 24-48 hours, and then edit one last time.   Remember this is the core of your application and it is your chance to articulate your core self and what care about in an authentic way.  It deserves all the time you can give. 

You’ve got the ‘Do’s’, now some ‘Don’ts’

• Don’t include anything in your Personal Statement that you would not be comfortable speaking about in an interview situation.  Remember, every last bit of your application is fair game and if you don’t want to be pressed on an experience, an opinion, or anything else that may find too personal to attend to in actual conversation, don’t put it in your statement;
• Don’t use your Personal Statement as a piece of opinion writing, a journal entry, a position statement, or even a faith statement.  Remember, this a nuanced assessment of who you are as it relates to what you are proposing to pursue on a national scholarship, in graduate school or as a professional;
• Don’t apologize for yourself or your experiences.  This includes undervaluing your undergraduate institution, your personal background, even what state you’ve come from.  Find a way to describe in writing the way you have turned challenges into opportunities;
• Don’t re-hash your CV.  You’ve provided all of the specific details of your actual experiences in your CV.  There is no point in re-telling it; you don’t have space in your word-count and you will surely lose the interest of your readers from the get-go;
• Don’t go hunting for samples of Personal Statements from CCSA staff, other advisors or the internet.  There is a reason they aren’t readily available and it is largely due to the fact that if you are trying to write something that is authentically ‘you’, using someone else’s formula won’t get you very far in that effort toward sincerity.  So, don’t bother hunting anything down.  Talk with CCSA staff on how to get started and then dive in;
• DON’T WAIT UNTIL THE LAST MINUTE! A Personal Statement written the day before the deadline will not be as successful as one that has received a good deal of time and attention.  And, in fact, a poorly written statement may prove a detriment to your success.  So, plan ahead, set a schedule, and then, get to it.

Additional resources to help with writing your Personal Statement:

• CCSA Information Sessions and Personal Statement Workshops – see our current CCSA Calendar for details about current offerings.
• UChicago Writing Center
• Writing Personal Statements online manual by Joe Schall

Food for Thought: Good writing takes time and practice.  Consider adding Strunk and White’s iconic text, ‘The Elements of Style,’ to your collection:  ‘Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell’.  

Writing a personal statement

Here is our advice on how best to show us what you have to offer and give us a sense of who you are as an individual. 

What are we looking for?

We are looking for excellent writing and a statement that is personal and unique to you. We want to understand:

• Your passion for your subject
• How you are a good fit for your chosen programme
• What you will bring to the university community

Before you start

Read the programme description and the modules offered.

Think about what skills, qualities, and experiences might be needed for a programme like this. 

Think about examples from your life that demonstrate these skills, qualities and experiences.

• Academic studies
• Extra-curricular activities
• Personal interests
• Achievements
• Exhibitions visited
• Competitions
• Work experience
• Taster days 
• Field trips
• Volunteering experience
• Were you inspired by the experience? What was inspiring about it?
• Did it make you want to learn more about something? 
• What did you learn through this experience about the subject? 
• Did you learn anything about yourself through this experience?
• Did you gain transferable skills through this experience? For example, teamwork, communication, or leadership skills? 

Your main focus should be on demonstrating your interest in, and describing your engagement with, the subject itself. The majority of your statement, around 75-85%, should focus on this subject, with the remaining 15-25% on extra-curricular activities or career aspirations. 

First draft

From all of your examples, and bearing in mind the structure, choose a few that are most relevant, and write about them in a detailed, specific, and reflective way. Relate these back to the skills, qualities, and experiences that you have identified are relevant to your chosen programme. 

Don’t forget: 

• Allow your passion for the subject to shine
• Show why are a good fit for your chosen programme
• Show what you will bring to our UCL community

Before you submit

Ask a teacher, advisor, friend or family member to read your statement and support you to think of other examples that you might have missed. Ask them to do a final spelling and grammar check.

Read your statement aloud to check that it flows well.

Make sure it is truthful and honest; some courses have an interview element so the admissions selector may ask you to expand further on something you wrote in your statement. 

Make sure it is applicable to all five of your UCAS choices; remember you can only submit one personal statement with your UCAS form.

Proofread for a final time. 

Our top tips

• 75%-85% of the statement must be about the subject
• Select only your best examples
• Reflect on your experiences
• Stay focused and relevant
• Let your passion for your subject shine
• Avoid clichés and bland, vague statements
• Proofread before submitting

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What is a Personal Statement?

The personal statement is your opportunity to show the universities you are applying to that you are the ideal candidate for their course.  It should be all about you – why you’re interested in the course, what makes you unique and what makes you stand out.  With only one personal statement for all your choices, it’s important that you use this opportunity to show why you’re better than everyone else applying and why we should choose you.

But where do you start?  What do you say?  What should be your opening sentence? There are good and bad personal statements, so read our guide to help make yours the best it can be. 

How to write a personal statement

Before writing your personal statement it’s worth doing a bit of research to find out what your choice universities are looking for and what will make you stand out from the competition.

Whilst “personal statement” makes it sound like it’s a biography about you, some of the best personal statements we’ve seen are more like a mini essay related to the course. Think about what areas of the subject you enjoy and tell us what you understand about them; we want to know your thoughts about them and why you think that. Show us your passion, knowledge and skills by demonstrating your engagement with the subject. Think about how you can back up what you say and that you can critically engage with your subject. If you got excited about a course because of an article or book you read, or a lecture you went to, tell us about it! 

Most of the statement should be about the subject you want to study, but we also like to hear a little bit about what you get involved in outside of your studies. We know that some of our applicants work part time, have carer responsibilities or perhaps are involved in high level sport, music or drama, for example, and it’s exciting to see applicants who are successful with their studies whilst also balancing other demands on their time as there’s a lot to get involved with at Durham. If you have relevant interests to your course then we’d like to hear about those too, for example if you’re applying to an education course and have been involved in tutoring other students. 

There are loads of UCAS resources you can use to help get you started, including a  personal statement mind map and worksheet .

Dos and Don’ts

You’ve only got 4000 characters, including spaces, to convince us we should choose you, so make every word count. These do’s and don’ts should help you along the way.

• Stay focussed and relevant.
• Be specific; use examples and give evidence.
• Be authentic, enthusiastic and persuasive.
• Avoid generic and obvious statements.
• Ask someone you trust for ideas and feedback – they might think of something you don’t!
• Draft your personal statement then copy and paste into Apply.
• Check your spelling and grammar and make sure you proofread.  Read your personal statement out loud or ask friends and family to read it for you.
• Try for a memorable, strong opening, an engaging middle, and tie up the key points you want to make at the end.
• Think about what you’re saying and what it says about you. Sell yourself! 
• Repeat yourself, and avoid repeating words close together. 
• Write a chronological history – instead think about the structure and what you want to feature at the start. 
• Waste characters! You only have 4000 so don’t include things like lists of your qualifications – we can see those in the qualifications section of your application already. 
• Use ‘I’ all the time. 
• Use clichés 
• Copy. UCAS has software that will detect if your personal statement has been copied from someone else’s and they’ll let all  the universities you’ve applied to know. 
• Expect to get it right first time.  You’ll need several drafts before you’re happy with it.

Writing an excellent personal statement needn’t be scary if you remember to be focussed, enthusiastic and genuine. We want something that tells us all about you and the contribution you can make to our community.

Substitute Personal Statements

It is not necessary to write an additional personal statement, however we have a tool just for Durham applicants which allows you to submit a substitute personal statement if the Durham course you’re applying to is very different to the one in your UCAS personal statement. 

For example, if you applied to four Chemistry courses but you also applied to our Natural Sciences course (even including Chemistry, but with other subjects too), or perhaps you have applied to Medicine at four other universities but chose Anthropology as your fifth choice with us.

We ask that you: 

• Use no more than 4000 characters (including spaces) to match the UCAS personal statement length 
• Use plain text – don't use bold, italics, underlining 
• Submit it within three days of your application to Durham being acknowledged.  
• This is because until we have your application from UCAS we won’t be able to match the statement (and the system won’t let you upload this); it can take UCAS a few days to process all the applications they’ve received.  
• If you reach three days without acknowledgement, you can still try to upload the personal statement – if it works then we have your application and the statement will be matched to it. 
• Read the guidance for writing a personal statement on this page 
• Use one of the following browsers when uploading the statement: Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer 10 (some users of Internet Explorer 11 have had difficulties uploading their statement).

Submit a substitute personal statement

Do you have a question?

Need to get in touch with us?

Similarity in Personal Statements

UCAS checks all personal statements with their Similarity Detection software (CopyCatch) to ensure your work doesn’t contain the same or similar text to websites, another applicant's personal statement, or other documents. When a personal statement is detected as having similarity to one of these sources, UCAS provides us with a report highlighting the similarity and an indication of what the text in the statement is similar to. 

Once we are notified that an application contains text similar to elsewhere, we will use information from UCAS and from the applicant to determine the seriousness of the similarity found in the personal statement and departments will then make an academic decision which is communicated to applicants through UCAS as normal. 

Each applicant whose personal statement is flagged to us by the UCAS Similarity Detection Service will be contacted by the UG Admissions Team to offer the opportunity to explain how the similarity occurred. 

For those admitted as a student, Durham University takes all forms of Academic Misconduct, including 'plagiarism' or 'copying' very seriously and submitting work which is not entirely a student's own can lead to expulsion from the University. We also operate a fair and transparent admissions process and as such, need to ensure that all information provided to us is honest and accurate. 

If you have submitted an application to us and you have been notified that UCAS has detected similarity in your personal statement, you can contact us directly to explain the similarity though.

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Writing the Personal Statement

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The personal statement, your opportunity to sell yourself in the application process, generally falls into one of two categories:

1. The general, comprehensive personal statement:

This allows you maximum freedom in terms of what you write and is the type of statement often prepared for standard medical or law school application forms.

2. The response to very specific questions:

Often, business and graduate school applications ask specific questions, and your statement should respond specifically to the question being asked. Some business school applications favor multiple essays, typically asking for responses to three or more questions.

Questions to ask yourself before you write:

• What's special, unique, distinctive, and/or impressive about you or your life story?
• What details of your life (personal or family problems, history, people or events that have shaped you or influenced your goals) might help the committee better understand you or help set you apart from other applicants?
• When did you become interested in this field and what have you learned about it (and about yourself) that has further stimulated your interest and reinforced your conviction that you are well suited to this field? What insights have you gained?
• How have you learned about this field—through classes, readings, seminars, work or other experiences, or conversations with people already in the field?
• If you have worked a lot during your college years, what have you learned (leadership or managerial skills, for example), and how has that work contributed to your growth?
• What are your career goals?
• Are there any gaps or discrepancies in your academic record that you should explain (great grades but mediocre LSAT or GRE scores, for example, or a distinct upward pattern to your GPA if it was only average in the beginning)?
• Have you had to overcome any unusual obstacles or hardships (for example, economic, familial, or physical) in your life?
• What personal characteristics (for example, integrity, compassion, and/or persistence) do you possess that would improve your prospects for success in the field or profession? Is there a way to demonstrate or document that you have these characteristics?
• What skills (for example, leadership, communicative, analytical) do you possess?
• Why might you be a stronger candidate for graduate school—and more successful and effective in the profession or field than other applicants?
• What are the most compelling reasons you can give for the admissions committee to be interested in you?

General advice

Answer the questions that are asked

• If you are applying to several schools, you may find questions in each application that are somewhat similar.
• Don't be tempted to use the same statement for all applications. It is important to answer each question being asked, and if slightly different answers are needed, you should write separate statements. In every case, be sure your answer fits the question being asked.

Tell a story

• Think in terms of showing or demonstrating through concrete experience. One of the worst things you can do is to bore the admissions committee. If your statement is fresh, lively, and different, you'll be putting yourself ahead of the pack. If you distinguish yourself through your story, you will make yourself memorable.

Be specific

• Don't, for example, state that you would make an excellent doctor unless you can back it up with specific reasons. Your desire to become a lawyer, engineer, or whatever should be logical, the result of specific experience that is described in your statement. Your application should emerge as the logical conclusion to your story.

Find an angle

• If you're like most people, your life story lacks drama, so figuring out a way to make it interesting becomes the big challenge. Finding an angle or a "hook" is vital.

Concentrate on your opening paragraph

• The lead or opening paragraph is generally the most important. It is here that you grab the reader's attention or lose it. This paragraph becomes the framework for the rest of the statement.

Tell what you know

• The middle section of your essay might detail your interest and experience in your particular field, as well as some of your knowledge of the field. Too many people graduate with little or no knowledge of the nuts and bolts of the profession or field they hope to enter. Be as specific as you can in relating what you know about the field and use the language professionals use in conveying this information. Refer to experiences (work, research, etc.), classes, conversations with people in the field, books you've read, seminars you've attended, or any other source of specific information about the career you want and why you're suited to it. Since you will have to select what you include in your statement, the choices you make are often an indication of your judgment.

Don't include some subjects

• There are certain things best left out of personal statements. For example, references to experiences or accomplishments in high school or earlier are generally not a good idea. Don't mention potentially controversial subjects (for example, controversial religious or political issues).

Do some research, if needed

• If a school wants to know why you're applying to it rather than another school, do some research to find out what sets your choice apart from other universities or programs. If the school setting would provide an important geographical or cultural change for you, this might be a factor to mention.

Write well and correctly

• Be meticulous. Type and proofread your essay very carefully. Many admissions officers say that good written skills and command of correct use of language are important to them as they read these statements. Express yourself clearly and concisely. Adhere to stated word limits.

Avoid clichés

• A medical school applicant who writes that he is good at science and wants to help other people is not exactly expressing an original thought. Stay away from often-repeated or tired statements.

For more information on writing a personal statement, see the personal statement vidcast .

Vandy Bloggers

Writing a Personal Statement

Posted by Kylie on Monday, September 13, 2010 in The College Essay .

Last year I was responsible for approximately 1,000 applications.  Numerically, far too many of my students look identical.  It’s the intangible pieces: essay, letters of recommendation, and extracurriculars that set one student apart from another.  The essay is my personal favorite.  I love a good story.  I know, though, that this can be a stressful part of the college application process. Below I provides some hints, suggestions, and notes.

When I was on the road recruiting this past week there seemed to be some confusion about the essay/personal statement requirement.  Vanderbilt only requires one essay and it is the essay found on the Common Application.  The CA provides six topics and number six is a “topic of your choice”.  At Vanderbilt we refer to the essay as your personal statement.  So, there are not two separate essays, but we’re hoping you’ll take the opportunity provided by the Common App to teach us more about you.

• Free writing is a great exercise.  Just write words, phrases, or snippets in a notebook.  Eventually something will spark your imagination.
• Make a list of items you talked about at lunch with your friends.  Some items may be inappropriate (don’t write about those!), but some stories you tell your friends are uniquely YOU.  Tell me those stories.
• There are 21 admission counselors in my office; you couldn’t possibly know what we “want to hear” on any given day, so just write what you want to say.

Suggestions:

• Students are more interesting than parents.  Your parents can be great proofreaders, but make sure the content is still you.
• Sarcasm, dry humor, and irony are wonderful story telling devices, but not great for the college application essay.  They come across as bitter or mean.
• Grammar is important.  However, I’m more interested in what you say than how you say it.  Feel free to be creative.
• About a month ago I picked up a copy of the book, “50 Successful Harvard Application Essays”.  I was not impressed.  Some were good, some were okay, and some were terrible.
• We don’t expect you to cure cancer or travel the world by the time you’re 18.  One of the best essays I read last year was about how a student’s car smelled like dirty shoes.
• I can tell when you reuse a paper from AP English .

As you’re completing your college application essay, think about the individuals on the reading end.  Admissions counselors are frenzied in the winter as we read through lots of files.  Students who make me laugh, cry, or just say “wow” move to the forefront of my mind at a time when my mind is quite muddled.  Don’t stress out, though.  We’re going to look at you holistically.  If your essay flops, there’s many other factors we’re considering.

Tags: admissions , admissions blog , Application Process , College Admissions , decision process , Early Decision , Early Decision at Vanderbilt , undergraduate admissions , vanderbilt , Vanderbilt Admissions , Vanderbilt Admissions Blog , Vanderbilt Admissions Blogs , Vanderbilt Admissions Committee , Vanderbilt Admissions Website , Vanderbilt Balance , Vanderbilt Blogs , Vanderbilt Early Decision , Vanderbilt University , Vanderbilt University Admissions

September 14th, 2010

Thank you for the practical advise!

“However, I’m more interested in what you say then in how you say it. ”

Um… that should be “than”, not “then”.

Otherwise, a very helpful post!

Ironic! Thanks to all the grammar police out there ;-) I do appreciate the help! Keep the feedback/comments/thoughts coming!

September 15th, 2010

“Free writing is a great exercise.” Amen. After 14 drafts on 14 different subjects, I think I finally found one that I’m pleased with!

September 23rd, 2010

Thanks for the advice! I was pleased to find out that our lives don’t have to be extraordinary in order for our essays to be good. I was worried I’d have to create world peace in order to get noticed! ;)

December 16th, 2010

Any tips for perspective grad students?

Kelsey: It really depends on the graduate program. My best advice is to talk to students already taking coursework in your field! Best wishes.

December 20th, 2010

The common app doesn’t provide a word limit. How long should our essay be? 500 words? 1500? Does it even matter?

December 21st, 2010

Tyler: No word limit.

December 28th, 2010

Would attaching an additional essay to my application strengthen it? Or do you prefer that students limit themselves to the 1 essay required by the common app?

Phil: It really depends on the student. Do what you think will best represent you and make your application strong.

April 20th, 2011

June 27th, 2011

Vanderbilt is my absolute number one choice for college, I have always excelled in school, except mathematics, I have struggled alot with it, but it’s my only weak subject. I write essays very well. If my essay is outstanding as well as my ACT score will they deny me because of my math struggles?

May 30th, 2012

Students are more interesting than parents. Your parents can be great proofreaders, but make sure the content is still you.

September 21st, 2012

I just want to wrtite my essay at the current moment. How do I view the essay topics for this year without having to go through all the trouble of going through the Common Application process?

September 24th, 2012

You can find a PDF version of the application on the CommonApp website ( https://www.commonapp.org/CommonApp/DownloadForms.aspx ). Simply download the Application (student form), and you will find the essay topics on the last page.

July 9th, 2013

[…] college entrance website’s like Vanderbilt’s.   Share this: Pin […]

April 7th, 2014

A great and direct piece of information. Hats off to the author for gathering so specific and spot on information. the applause in the comments do the justice. Great piece of information.

September 14th, 2014

can you please give me an example

September 17th, 2014

Are you asking for an example of a personal statement, Bharat? Because the nature of personal statements are so individual (so personal ), I don’t think sharing an example would be much help. I can point you to another great post with some good resources, though: http://admissions.vanderbilt.edu/vandybloggers/2013/09/how-to-write-your-personal-essay/ .

Again, thanks for the question!

September 9th, 2016

Where can you find the essay topics?

September 20th, 2016

Jaden, thanks for your question. You can find the essay prompts online at the web site for each application. For instance, here is a link to the essay prompts for the Common Application: http://www.commonapp.org/whats-appening/application-updates/common-application-announces-2016-2017-essay-prompts

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Application Pro Tip - Personal Statement

We ask for your personal statement to be approximately two to four pages in length - the prompt is reproduced below. This does not mean it must be four pages. If you can address what we ask in two or three pages, do it. There is no need to ramble on or regurgitate what is already stated simply to reach a personal statement length of four pages. Be brief. Be brilliant. Be yourself. (But in four pages or less!)

“ Your personal statement should showcase your strengths and provide an overview of your background, goals, academic and professional aspirations, and a commitment to public service. The personal statement should be  approximately   two to four pages , double-spaced. If you wish to address any weaknesses in your application, it is better to write a separate, succinct, fact-based explanation as an addendum. ”

Fall is in full swing in Central New Jersey, and our Admission Team is on the road around the country and around the world. Please  check this space  to see if we will be at an event near you.

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What is the personal statement?

Many applications for research opportunities require a personal statement. This is an opportunity for you to show your critical thinking skills in a creative format. It is where you get to add your voice to the mix of materials that reviewers see when you apply for fellowships. Use the personal statement to highlight positive aspects about yourself that may not be apparent in other parts of your application.

The personal statement is your place to ask and answer questions about your past, present and future, including:

• What has brought you to this point in your life?
• What have you learned from your past experiences?
• What do you want to do with your studies?
• How will this fellowship help you pursue you goals?
• Why should this fellowship want to invest in you?

The personal statement should not be a simple list of your activities and accomplishments. Instead, try to craft a narrative that shows the review committee reader that you have the qualities the fellowship is looking for.

How to write a personal statement

You can approach the personal statement in many different ways. Some students like to start with an outline, while others start by brainstorming. The main points are: What are a few things you want people to know about you? Why is this fellowship right for you?

Writing improves with successive drafts. It is not unusual to write several drafts of the personal statement. As long as the fellowship rules allow it (and most do), you should bring your writing to the URF advisers. We can discuss your ideas at any stage and talk in-depth with you about your statement. We don't try to fit you into a mold. Instead, our goal is to help you write a statement that you feel best represents you!

Keep these ideas in mind as you write:

• Use specific examples from your life to highlight your positive qualities--the more concrete the better.
• Include stories from your life, your favorite quotes, or anecdotes that reveal how you define yourself and see the world
• Show your reader that the issues that move you are important. Get them to want to "fight the fight" with you.
• Describe the ways you want to make an impact in the world.

Once you have written your personal statement, invite friends and family to read it. Do they think it portrays the person they know? Selection committees value authenticity above all other qualities. Make sure your statement reflects your true values and aspirations.

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TEACHx Explores New and Renewed Norms in Teaching and Learning

Posted Date: May 20, 2024

TEACHx 2024 took place May 15 – 16 and showcased over 40 sessions in multiple formats, covering various topics selected from a record number of 80 submissions. Over 250 participants attended workshops, panels, and interactive presentations.  We invited attendees to reflect on what the current moment in higher education is teaching us about learning and ponder beyond the now to ask what educators need for a successful path forward.

Victoria Getis, senior director of Northwestern IT's Teaching and Learning Technologies (TLT) team and TEACHx founder, noted the buzz of excitement in the air, particularly day one's workshops, which included everything from accessibility to improvisation techniques in teaching. For the first time, participants had the option of focusing their TEACHx experience through coordinated “ tracks ” designed to allow a deep dive into accessibility and Universal Design for Learning, artificial intelligence, alternative grading and assessment, civil discourse, engagement, active play-based learning, inclusive teaching, language teaching, and wellness. The diversity of topics covered in one conference is partly due to the presenters' variety of academic fields, research interests, and teaching styles. Session leaders represented 13 different institutions, and attendees hailed from more than 15. Getis remarked that the growing reach of participants signals that “TEACHx is taking its place as a regional conference.”

Keynote Key Points

Susan D. Blum, professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, delivered the keynote address on May 16. She has spent decades researching the nature of institutional education, and her work explores cultural, linguistic, and psychological anthropology of teaching and learning. Her talk was titled Authentic, Joyful, Meaningful Learning in College: Is It Possible?

Blum also touched on concerns about how generative artificial intelligence (AI) will shape the future of education and learning. She suggested that rather than a reactive approach to worrying about how to keep AI out of the classroom, we look back to similar moments of concern. She pointed out earlier higher education alarm about the advent of Wikipedia corrupting students' ability to learn research methods and how to evaluate source material. She pointed back further to the long debate over handheld calculators as they advanced to perform more complex computational tasks. Blum’s anthropological framework asks educators to keep their perspectives broad and aim to shift arguments from why AI should or should not be an allowable tool to why, when, and how students and teachers alike can deploy generative AI tools to benefit the natural learning process.

Student Presence and Collaborations

Sparked in part by the tremendous reception to student panels at last year’s event, TEACHx 2024 expanded student involvement to its most substantial extent to date. Students led and co-presented everything from lightning talks to poster sessions, panels, and the highly celebrated interactive augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR) room. Student highlights include:

• Jaz Thomasian, a PhD candidate in the Bienen School of Music, shared a digital poster about their podcast, "Pedagogy Pulse."
• Zachary Lewis, Joey McGarry, Yasmeen Mohammed Rafee, and Noelle Robinson, all undergraduate students, joined their instructor—PhD candidate Charles Logan—in a panel to share their exploration of AI, equity, and public education , stemming from a Fall 2023 School of Education and Social Policy course (connected to the TREE Lab ) on the same topic.
• Eduardo Alejandro, a PhD candidate in physics and astronomy, presented a popular digital poster titled Inclusive Unit Conversion Activity for STEM Courses .
• Undergraduate social policy and global health major Emily Lester and Noelle Sullivan, a Global Health Studies professor, partnered on a lightning talk, Supporting Northwestern’s Neurodivergent Learners .
• Kat Caribeaux, an art history PhD candidate, and Craig Stevens, an archaeology PhD candidate, work with Northwestern IT’s Media and Technology Innovation team and led interactive AR/VR Reality Room components.

New This Year

Lightning talks were a new addition at the request of previous attendees. The high energy of presenters and the range of innovative and creative topics covered made the talks among the most complimented offerings.

Through the civil discourse track, attendees were given five different opportunities to explore techniques for building their own and their students’ discussion, dialogue, and perspective-taking skills, helping them gain skills in navigating difficult conversations and subjects in the classroom and beyond.

AI Sparks New Questions about Evergreen Concerns and Enthusiasm for Innovation

Associate Professor of Digital Media Design, Northwestern in Qatar, Spencer Striker’s packed presentation, Creativity in the Age of AI: Forging New in Media Education , explored how AI revolutionizes how we design, create, and experience media. Among many enthusiastic audience members for Professor Striker’s talk was Jennifer Keys, senior director of Northwestern's Searle Center for Advancing Learning and Teaching. She raved, “My mind is still reverberating from Professor Spencer Striker’s fascinating demo pulling back the curtain on how AI is transforming digital media design. The audience was captivated by his harnessing the power of generative AI production tools like Midjourney, Kaiber, and ElevenLabs to create a movie sizzler. Students must experience authentic and meaningful learning as they grapple with the complexities.”

Elizabeth Lenaghan, assistant director of the Northwestern Cook Family Writing Program, The Writing Place, discussed the necessity of understanding the why behind when one might or might not benefit from using AI and balancing that against maintaining one’s authentic voice. Mark Presnell, executive director of career advancement in the Division of Student Affairs, made similar points and explained that students must understand that employers will rely on them to distinguish when and when not to assign tasks to AI, and more importantly, they will need to be able to evaluate AI-generated output for both basic and complex tasks.

The panel’s unifying message was that instructors need not focus on whether students should use AI as a strict matter of policy but instead help students determine when, why, and how using AI is or is not in their best interest. The panelists also noted that students join educators with conflicting views about AI. Many students have reported that they don’t want to use AI, citing concerns ranging from inaccuracy to environmental apprehensions to trepidations about privacy and protecting authoring rights.

My mind is still reverberating from Professor Spencer Striker’s fascinating demo pulling back the curtain on how AI is transforming digital media design. The audience was captivated by his harnessing the power of generative AI production tools like Midjourney, Kaiber, and ElevenLabs to create a movie sizzler. Students must experience authentic and meaningful learning as they grapple with the complexities.”

Jennifer Keys Senior Director  Searle Center for Advancing Learning and Teaching

Attention to Accessibility

AccessibleNU sponsored the featured workshop, Essential for Some, Helpful for All , led by Luis Pérez, disability and digital inclusion lead, for CAST. The workshop provided a unique opportunity to learn from one of the best in the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and accessibility fields. The night before the session, Perez was a featured speaker at The White House, celebrating CAST's work on incorporating UDL in the National Ed Tech Plan. Perez offered common-sense and practical approaches to accessibility that resonate with the strategies promoted through Northwestern’s Mission: Accessible challenge .

“Creating accessible learning environments, especially in the digital space, can often be intimidating. Perez’s workshop did an excellent job of helping participants understand why developing accessible environments benefits all individuals by sharing his experiences as a visually impaired individual," said Jim Stachowiack, accessible technology strategy and operations lead, AccessibleNU and Teaching and Learning Technologies. "He also alleviated some intimidation by reassuring people that they don't have to be perfect and encouraging them to continue adjusting their courses and course materials as they learn more.”

Canvas Hall of Fame

TEACHx concluded with the third annual Canvas Hall of Fame, which spotlighted educators who students nominated for excellence in using Canvas. The winners were among the 256 instructors nominated by 499 students, recognizing 388 courses across all 12 Northwestern schools. Miriam Sherin and Jim Stachowiak emceed the ceremony with the French department’s Aude Raymond and Patricia Scarampi, two of the three co-teachers who won the 2023 Most Innovative Course Site award, presenting this year’s winners. The 2024 winners are:

• Aaron Greicius , assistant professor of instruction, in the Department of Mathematics and academic director of the mathematics PhD program in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, received a special certificate of recognition for his outstanding efforts as a champion of student success and his groundbreaking work negotiating vendor contracts to save students over $100,000 in the cost of course materials.
• Eli Kean , assistant professor of instruction in gender and sexuality studies, in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, received an honorable mention. Professor Kean’s Fall 2023 course, Beyond the Binary: Transgender and Race, was nominated in multiple categories.
• Best Use of Video: Erez Levy , visiting associate professor of finance, for his Fall 2023 course, Finance I.
• Excellence in DEI/Accessibility: Rosemary Bush , assistant professor of instruction, Program in Environmental Science, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, for her Fall 2023 course, Earth: A Habitable Planet.
• Most Innovative Course Site: Connor Bain , assistant professor of instruction, McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, for his Spring 2023 course, Introduction to Computer Programming.

TEACHx Photo Gallery

Photography by Northwestern IT Media and Technology Innovation

What’s Next for TEACHx

Now completing its ninth year, TEACHx has cemented itself as a staple symposium where Northwestern faculty and instructors engage colleagues and peers across the Midwest. It continues to find new ways to innovate and elevate the discourse around teaching and learning, as well as centering the critical role of technology in creating new possibilities for improving pedagogy and educational practices. Victoria Getis beamed with pride for her team’s fantastic work. “I'm delighted about what the Teaching and Learning Technologies team has created and eager to see what comes next.”

How much money should I gift someone for college graduation?

• Published: May. 22, 2024, 6:05 p.m.

Oh the places they'll go: College graduates have just crossed another major life milestone off their list, and if you'll be gifting one soon, here's what you need to know. Canva

• Danielle Halibey | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

Any occasion where tassels are moved from right to left and then followed with a storm of caps being thrown into the air is cause for celebration!

It’s an exciting time when someone we care about graduates from college . So, whether you’ve been asked to a graduation party, invited to a more intimate graduation brunch, lunch or dinner with the family or, perhaps even less formally, sent a graduation announcement in the mail, you may like to show your support and celebrate their achievement with a monetary gift that lets them choose something they truly want or need.

Deciding to give cash, a check or a gift card might seem straightforward, but there are various nuances to consider, such as your relationship with the graduate, their field of study, as well as their future plans.

Acknowledging your relationship. The first thing to consider when deciding on a monetary gift for a college graduate is your relationship with them. Are you a close family member, sibling, cousin, aunt or uncle, best friend, sorority sister or fraternity brother or, maybe, even a supportive mentor? Your level of closeness can influence the amount you may want to give. It’s not all about the dollar value, but rather the thought and effort put into it.

Taking their field of study into account. Next, think about the field of study the graduate pursued. The amount you give could vary depending on whether they completed their undergraduate, graduate, medical or law degree. Keep in mind that some fields may require additional economic support as graduates transition into their professional lives. For example, medical or law school graduates often face substantial student loan debts. Contributing towards alleviating those financial strains can be a truly meaningful gift.

Considering their next steps. Where the graduate is headed after college can also help you land on an appropriate gift amount. Are they entering the workforce, pursuing further education, embarking on an internship, traveling or exploring new opportunities before jumping into their next chapter of life? Factoring in their future plans lets you match your gift with their immediate needs. An ample gift can provide a helpful boost, while a smaller gift can still convey your support and encouragement.

Here are some general tips for determining the perfect gift amount for the newly-minted grad.

Budget within your means. Give from the heart, but remember to choose an amount that is comfortable for you and aligns with your personal finances.

Be thoughtful. Consider including a handwritten note or card to express your pride and well wishes. A sweet inscription goes a long way in making your gift truly special.

Personalize the gift. If you’re close to the graduate, think about their interests, hobbies or long-term ambitions. Consider making your monetary contribution toward something purposeful like a travel fund, a professional development course, or even a new work wardrobe.

College graduation gift: If you’d like some numbers as a jumping-off point

Again, these amounts are not set in stone and should be adjusted based on your own personal circumstances and the significance of your relationship with the graduate.

Acquaintance or colleague: $50 to $75. This reflects a gesture of goodwill and congratulations without overextending. If you’ve built a closer connection with the graduate over time, you might lean towards the higher end of this range to acknowledge your evolving rapport.

Close friend or distant relative: $75 to $200. This amount correlates with your closer relationship and shows that you’re invested in their future endeavors. If the graduate holds a particularly special place in your heart, leaning towards the higher end of this range can help relay that sentiment.

Family member: $200 to $500. Close family members, such as parents, grandparents, godparents or close aunts and uncles might consider a more substantial gift to mark the occasion and show your ever-brimming pride in this young adult’s accomplishments.

Do you need to give a gift if there’s no grad party or dedicated brunch, lunch or dinner?

It’s natural to wonder about gifting if there isn’t a formal graduation party or dedicated event to celebrate the grad on the calendar. If you find yourself in a position where sending a gift doesn’t quite fit the bill, there are still plenty of meaningful ways to honor and support the graduate without a physical present or cash gift.

Pen a heartfelt letter or send a meaningful card to express your sincerest congratulations and best wishes in a personal way. Or, if it feels comfortable, volunteer to update their resume, provide career advice or even help them prepare for interviews. Navigating the post-graduation phase can be overwhelming and confusing, but practical, work-focused, yet easy-going dialogue with the new professional can prove invaluable.

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Election Updates: Trump rallies in the South Bronx.

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As the final protesters trickled out, police officers milled about and Donald Trump’s motorcade sped away in the distance, New York City park workers moved in with trash cans and grabbers and began cleaning Crotona Park, the site of the rally. “It’s not too bad,” said one worker between emptying his dust pan filled with trash. “It could be worse.”

Rally participants began streaming out of the Bronx park around 8 p.m. as Donald Trump ended his speech by saying he would “make America great again.” Scherie Murray, a Republican political consultant from Queens, called Trump’s speech “amazing.” “Trump is showing up in communities that Republicans don’t normally show up in,” Murray said.

Michael Gold

Donald Trump acknowledged he wasn’t sure of the reception he might get in deep-blue New York City. “I woke up, I said, I wonder will it be hostile or will it be friendly?” He looked out at the crowd. “It was a love fest!”

Tensions outside the rally have appeared to ease. Police blocked protesters from the entrance to the Trump rally using metal barricades. Many of the anti-Trump protesters across the street from the rally entrance have cleared out.

Donald Trump has made a number of promises during this speech in the Bronx that are the stuff of mayoral campaigns: to improve safety on the subways, to clear homeless encampments and to remove mentally ill people from streets and parks. These are much smaller pledges than the sweeping ones he routinely makes on the trail in swing states.

A huge cheer rang out in this crowd in New York, a sanctuary city that built a reputation as a beacon for immigrants, as Donald Trump pledged to carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.

Separated by two rows of police officers and a street, some pro-Trump protesters are chanting “USA” and telling the anti-Trump protesters to “Go back home.” An officer said the police were lined up to keep the two sides apart and keep everyone safe.

Dozens of New York Police Department officers on bikes and others with plastic handcuffs have lined up in front of the group protesting the rally. Police are pushing people onto the sidewalk.

Donald Trump’s event is essentially in a field inside Crotona Park in the Bronx, so it’s tough to fully gauge crowd size but it appears that more than a thousand people are in the grassy area in front of him, with a significant number still outside waiting to get through the security screening.

Donald Trump repeated a claim he has made before: that he believes many of the Israeli hostages taken by Hamas on Oct. 7 are already dead. Trump, who often says he is the most pro-Israel president in history, has said Israel needs to finish its war quickly and has attacked Biden as being insufficiently supportive.

As Donald Trump began speaking about how he tried to build a wall at the southern border with Mexico while president, the crowd here in the South Bronx, which includes a considerable number of Hispanic immigrants, began chanting, “Build the wall!”

Derick Williams, 67, never thought Donald Trump would visit the Bronx. Williams is a Bronx native, but now lives in Bushwick and arrived to Crotona Park, where Trump is holding a rally tonight, five hours before the event began. He wanted to experience being around other Trump supporters, which he finds rare in New York. Usually, “you’re the thumb in the crowd,” he said. “For once, I feel like the majority.”

A crowd of protesters has sprung up across from the entrance to Trump’s rally. They’re gathered around a sign that reads: “Convict Trump Already!” About 15 police officers are separating the protesters from the rally entrance. There’s music and profane chanting. The occasional Trump supporter wanders over to challenge the crowd.

Donald Trump opened his rally in the Bronx tonight by essentially declaring his love for New York, calling it “the city I helped build and the city we all love.” Citing the hundreds of people cheering in front of him, he asked, “Who said we’re not going to win New York?” The state hasn’t voted for a Republican president since 1980, and Trump lost by double-digit gaps in 2016 and 2020.

Ahead of Donald Trump’s remarks in the Bronx tonight, the Rev. Rubén Díaz Sr., a former Democratic city councilman who opposes abortion rights and has a history of backing Republicans, expressed a sentiment shared by many voters at this rally: “No one has ever come to the Bronx like this. Only Donald Trump.” The borough is not a typical campaign spot for presidential candidates.

Standing outside the Trump rally, Theodore Kelley, 67, a retired truck driver who lives in the neighborhood around Crotona Park was angry that the rally was being held here. “I came to see what it was all about,” Kelley said. “I’m not expecting to see any of my neighbors here because they wouldn’t come to support Trump.”

George Santos, the disgraced former Republican congressman who was expelled from the House last year , is among several notable New York Republicans in attendance at Donald Trump’s rally tonight in the South Bronx.

Ahead of Donald Trump’s rally tonight in the Bronx, a diverse crowd of about 500 people have gathered inside Crotona Park, with at least a thousand more waiting in line to enter. It’s a sea of MAGA hats, which makes the occasional navy blue Yankees cap stand out.

There’s a carnival-like atmosphere outside tonight’s Trump rally in the South Bronx, with a line of people waiting to get in. A Trump impersonator attracted a crowd chanting “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” Vendors are selling MAGA hats and anti-Joe Biden pins.

Chris Cameron

After losing a bruising, expensive Senate primary in Maryland, Representative David Trone endorsed his former opponent, Angela Alsobrooks , at a Democratic Party event today. Trone, who co-owns the country’s largest wine retailer, spent more than $60 million of his personal fortune on his failed Senate campaign.

A poll from Marquette Law School today shows Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at 17 percent support, representing a third poll that meets CNN’s requirements to participate in its debate on June 27. Kennedy needs four approved polls above 15 percent support by June 20. He must also get on the ballot in enough states to have a chance to win 270 electoral college votes. He is currently well below that threshold .

Nikki Haley saying she would vote for Donald J. Trump, after he insulted her husband and her marriage , recalls a similar situation in the 2016 campaign. Senator Ted Cruz, then running against Trump for the Republican nomination, denounced him in fiery exchanges for insulting tweets targeting Cruz’s wife, Heidi. Cruz held out on an endorsement after dropping out, but by October was phone-banking for Trump.

At a Trump rally in the Bronx, chants of ‘Build the wall.’

Miles from the rather somber Manhattan courtroom where he has spent much of the past five weeks as a criminal defendant, former President Donald J. Trump on Thursday stood at a park in the Bronx, surveyed the crowd and acknowledged he had been concerned over how he might be greeted at his first rally in New York State in eight years, and his first ever in the borough.

In front of him was a more diverse crowd than is typical of his rallies, with many Black and Hispanic voters sporting bright red “Make America Great Again” hats and other Trump-themed apparel ordinarily scarce in deep-blue New York City. Still more people stood outside, waiting to get past security.

“I woke up, I said, ‘I wonder, will it be hostile or will it be friendly?’” Mr. Trump said. “It was beyond friendly. It was a love fest.”

As is often the case during Mr. Trump's speeches, the truth was a bit more complex. As he spoke, more than 100 protesters demonstrated outside the fenced-off area of Crotona Park where he had staged the rally. A wave of elected officials denounced his visit to the city. And his insistence that he would carry New York in November — though perhaps not as laughable as it once might have sounded, judging from at least one recent poll — conveniently disregarded the thumping he took in the state in the 2016 and 2020 elections.

But as heated arguments took place outside his rally, Mr. Trump, who veered occasionally into lengthy New York-focused reminiscences that were lost on his supporters, seemed to relish the chance to appear in his hometown, seize media attention and know that New Yorkers would hear what he had to say, like it or not, one way or the other.

Throughout the rally, Mr. Trump, one of New York’s most famous native sons, who formally made Florida his home in 2019, embraced the chance to demonstrate his support in the city he left behind — and which he swore he still loved, even as he decried it as descending into chaos.

“New York was where you came to make it big. You want to make it big, you had to be in New York,” he said. “But sadly, this is now a city in decline.”

His remarks largely followed familiar patterns as he railed against the Biden administration and made explicit overtures to Black and Latino voters. He lamented the surge of migrants across the southern border and criticized President Biden’s economic policies as disproportionately hurting people of color, whose support he is eager to win from Democrats.

“African Americans are getting slaughtered. Hispanic Americans are getting slaughtered,” he said.

He also insisted that the migrant influx, which has prompted a crisis in New York, was disproportionately hurting “our Black population and our Hispanic population, who are losing their jobs, losing their housing, losing everything they can lose.”

Mr. Trump’s screeds against those crossing the border illegally and his vow to conduct the “largest deportation operation” in U.S. history — both staples of his campaign rallies — were met with cheers.

Unprompted, many in the crowd responded by chanting “Build the wall,” a reference to Mr. Trump’s effort during his presidency to build a wall on the southern border, and then, later, “Send them back.”

They did not appear to object to his broad assertion, which has no evidence, that those coming across the border were mentally ill criminals mounting an invasion of the United States.

“They want to get us from within,” Mr. Trump said. “I think they’re building an army.”

The approving reception for such anti-immigrant messaging was particularly striking in New York, a sanctuary city that has over decades built a reputation as a beacon for immigrants.

Some in the crowd said they were immigrants but were quick to clarify that they had crossed the border legally and that they disapproved of those who did not.

“I understand this country is built up of immigrants,” said Indiana Mitchell, 47, who said she was from the Dominican Republic. “But I came to this country in the right way. I didn’t come in through the backyard., I came in through the front door.”

Mr. Trump often discusses how the migrant crisis is playing out in New York during rallies in battleground states, where it remains a more abstract idea to many of his supporters.

But people at his Bronx rally said they had directly seen the impact on their neighborhoods of the surge of migrants, which has strained the municipal budget as the city provides housing and other social services.

Rafael Brito, a Queens resident who said he had come to the United States from the Dominican Republic, said he thought the migrant crisis had exacerbated crime and made it more difficult for his neighbors to get services they needed.

“The whole neighborhood has changed,” Mr. Brito, 51, said.

Outside the rally, those protesting said they had felt compelled to come to the park to make their voices heard in opposition to Mr. Trump’s views.

Melvin Howard, 65, a machinist who lives near Crotona Park, said he wanted to make clear his disapproval of the rally being held in his neighborhood and the views of the people attending it.

“These people shouldn’t be here in the South Bronx,” he said, pointing to a large number of white people in the crowd in a borough where the white population is less than 10 percent. “They are here to steal our Black votes. I don’t recognize any of them.”

As the protesters were demonstrating, the atmosphere became momentarily charged, with Trump supporters and anti-Trump protesters screaming obscenities at one another from across the street. The New York Police Department began separating both sides, lining the streets with metal barricades.

The Bronx remains one of the most Democratic counties in the country. President Biden won the borough by 68 percent in 2020, though Mr. Trump improved on his performance in 2016, when he lost by 79 percentage points.

But Mr. Trump brushed off those past results. “Don’t assume it doesn’t matter just because you live in a blue city,” he said. “You live in a blue city, but it’s going red very very quickly.”

Mr. Trump’s outing in the city where he spent most of his life seemed to elicit more reflectiveness than is characteristic of his stump speeches in battleground states.

He spent considerable time celebrating his history with New York, recounting his refurbishing an ice-skating rink in Central Park and his stewardship of a public golf course in the Bronx.

And he salted his speech with life lessons.

He expressed his admiration, at some length, for his father, a real-estate developer who Mr. Trump said loved to work and did so relentlessly, including on Sundays, and for the home builder William Levitt, who built Levittowns on Long Island and in other states. But Mr. Trump observed that Mr. Levitt had exited his business too early and was unable to make a comeback when he wanted to years later.

The reason, Mr. Trump said, was that he had squandered his momentum.

“You have to always keep moving forward,” Mr. Trump said. “And when it’s your time, you have to know it’s your time.”

Jeffery C. Mays contributed reporting.

Trump plays up his Putin ties in claiming he could get Gershkovich released.

Former President Donald J. Trump claimed that, if re-elected, he could draw on his relationship with President Vladimir V. Putin to press Russia into releasing Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter who has been detained in a Moscow jail for more than a year.

Mr. Trump wrote in a social media post that Mr. Gershkovich would be “released almost immediately after the election, but definitely before I assume office,” suggesting that his securing Mr. Gershkovich’s release was contingent on his defeating President Biden in November.

“Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, will do that for me, but not for anyone else,” Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, added. Mr. Trump has frequently bragged about his positive relationship with Mr. Putin, whose strongman tendencies he has praised in interviews and on the campaign trail.

Asked about Mr. Trump’s post, a spokesman for the Kremlin, Dmitri S. Peskov, told reporters that “Putin has no contact with Donald Trump, of course.”

Mr. Gershkovich, who was arrested in March last year in Russia and charged with espionage shortly after, has been designated by the White House as “wrongfully detained,” a label signifying that the United States views him as the equivalent of a political hostage and believes the charges against him are fabricated.

Russia has not presented any evidence to support the spying charge, which Mr. Gershkovich and The Journal have vociferously rejected. The Biden administration has said it is working to secure his release.

T.J. Ducklo, a Biden campaign spokesman, criticized Mr. Trump over his claims that he turned down a deal to free Paul Whelan , a former Marine serving a 16-year sentence in Russia on what U.S. officials say are bogus espionage charges.

“For Donald Trump, these wrongfully imprisoned Americans are political weapons and props to use for his own gain. For Joe Biden, they are human beings whose loved ones and family members he has spent time with,” Mr. Ducklo said in a statement.

Mr. Gershkovich’s arrest was among a series of detentions of Americans in Russia over the past six years, which has raised concerns that Russia is hoping to use U.S. citizens as bargaining chips to secure the release of Russians being held in the West.

Mr. Trump often invokes his bond with Mr. Putin to bolster his claims that he could end the war in Ukraine, and that if he was still in office, the conflict would never have happened.

But while Mr. Trump has commented on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine many times, he had not spoken publicly about Mr. Gershkovich’s detention until last month, after he had been detained for more than a year.

In an interview with Time magazine , Mr. Trump explained his silence on the issue by saying: “I guess because I have so many things I’m working on. I have hundreds of things,” adding, “I probably have said very good things about him. Maybe it wasn’t reported.”

Mr. Trump also insisted then that he would be able to secure Mr. Gershkovich’s release more successfully than Mr. Biden because of his relationship with Mr. Putin. “I get along very well with Putin, but the reporter should be released and he will be released,” he said.

Russian officials have said that discussions about Mr. Gershkovich and other Americans detained in the country were being conducted “through a specialized closed channel.” The Kremlin spokesman, Mr. Peskov, on Thursday said that any conversations about Mr. Gershkovich’s release “must be conducted in complete silence and absolutely discreetly.” He added, “Only thus can they have a result.”

Mr. Ducklo sought to make a comparison between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin.

“Trump has called journalists ‘enemies of the people’ and pledged to imprison reporters whose coverage he doesn’t like — not all that dissimilar to what’s happening right now to Evan Gershkovich in Russia,” he said in the statement.

Anton Troianovski contributed reporting.

The governor of Ohio calls a special legislative session to ensure Biden is on the ballot.

Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio has called a special session of the General Assembly to resolve an issue that the state’s top elections official has said would prevent President Biden from being placed on the November ballot there.

Frank LaRose, the Republican secretary of state, had previously said that he planned to exclude Mr. Biden from the ballot because he would be officially nominated after a deadline for certifying presidential nominees on the ballot. This is usually a minor procedural issue, and states have almost always offered quick solutions to ensure that major presidential candidates are not excluded.

But a legislative fix that would have moved the deadline stalled out after colliding with a partisan clash over foreign donations. Republicans in the Ohio Senate advanced a bill that would resolve the issue but attached a partisan measure that would ban foreign money in state ballot initiatives. The measure went nowhere, and the General Assembly adjourned on Wednesday without a solution in place.

Mr. DeWine, who is also a Republican, said in his statement announcing the special session that the legislature had “failed to take action on this urgent matter,” noting that Ohio had previously passed temporary extensions to its certification deadline for President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in 2012 and for President Donald J. Trump in 2020.

The governor said that the special session, which will begin on Tuesday, would be to pass legislation ensuring Mr. Biden is on the ballot, as well as legislation that would “prohibit campaign spending by foreign nationals.” Dan Tierney, a spokesman for Mr. DeWine, said that it would be up to the General Assembly whether the two measures would be in separate bills.

“It is important that when Ohioans cast their vote” for president, Mr. DeWine said, “they have the opportunity to cast a vote for either of the major-party candidates for those offices.”

Mr. LaRose, who had previously pushed for a legislative fix for the issue, lauded Mr. DeWine’s decision in a statement on social media, saying, “I applaud his decisive leadership in calling a special session to resolve this issue for the voters of our state.”

Other states had similar procedural issues this year where the late date of Mr. Biden’s nomination clashed with deadlines to get candidates on the ballot. Those states resolved the issue fairly quickly. In Alabama, for example, the State Legislature overwhelmingly passed a law granting an extension to the deadline. In Washington State, election officials said they would accept a provisional certification of Mr. Biden’s nomination.

But a legislative fix in Ohio had appeared all but dead earlier this week, with Jason Stephens, the House speaker, saying there was “just not the will” to pass a solution in the legislature. In a letter to the Democratic Party this week, Mr. LaRose also said he would not accept a provisional certification, adding that he would “instruct boards of elections to begin preparing ballots that do not include the Democratic Party’s nominees” unless the party offered a “legally acceptable remedy” for the issue.

Jeffery C. Mays

One of America’s most Democratic counties prepares for a Trump visit.

After weeks of being the headline-grabbing defendant in a criminal trial in Manhattan, Donald J. Trump will head to Crotona Park in the Bronx for a rally on Thursday where he no doubt hopes to take a more favorable star turn.

Predictably, many people in the Bronx are not happy about that.

“I wish he would just disappear,” said Noel Rivera, a retired subway track worker who was walking his dog in Crotona Park on Wednesday. “Nobody that I know supports him.”

Mr. Trump’s event on Thursday evening in the expansive park in the South Bronx is his first campaign rally in New York State since 2016.

His choice of the Bronx might seem odd, since it is one of the most deeply Democratic counties in the country.In 2020, President Biden won the Bronx by 68 percent. In 2016, Mr. Trump lost the Bronx by more than 300,000 votes.

Brian Hughes, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said the rally is part of an effort by Mr. Trump to “make sure that constituents that are not traditionally Republican to get spoken to, are seen and are heard.”

Mr. Trump, a longtime New Yorker who now lives in Florida, has spent much of his recent weeks in Manhattan at his criminal trial on charges that he falsified business records to cover up a payment to a porn star, who said she had a sexual encounter with him in 2006. The defense rested without Mr. Trump taking the stand; closing arguments are scheduled for Tuesday.

At the rally, Mr. Trump is expected to talk about inflation and violent crime, said a campaign spokeswoman. The rally has a permit for 3,500 people, according to the Police Department.

“We’re making inroads across the city,” said Representative Nicole Malliotakis, the lone Republican member of New York City’s House delegation. “But you have to show up, and you have to talk to people about the issues that they care about. Right now those issues are the economy and public safety.”

The Bronx is 57 percent Hispanic, 28 percent Black and 8 percent white , according to census date. Recent polls show Mr. Trump gaining ground among some Black and Latino voters. Last year, a Republican councilwoman was elected to represent the Bronx for the first time in more than 40 years. Lee Zeldin, the Republican nominee for governor in 2022, came within six points of Gov. Kathy Hochul. But Ms. Hochul beat Mr. Zeldin by 55 percentage points in the Bronx.

Representative Ritchie Torres, a Bronx Democrat, said Mr. Trump owes the borough an apology because of his “catastrophic management” of the pandemic, which cost thousands of people in the borough their lives.

“He is so unpopular in the Bronx that he’s radioactive,” Mr. Torres said. “His approval ratings are lower than that of lead and arsenic .”

A protest elsewhere in the park is planned during Mr. Trump’s rally by Amanda Septimo, an assemblywoman from the Bronx, and Kirsten John Foy, president of the activism group Arc of Justice.

Mr. Foy said the rally, with prominent city unions, is designed to counter the narrative that Mr. Trump will do significantly better in places like the Bronx.

“He’s trying to distract and to deflect from the fact that he’s under criminal indictment,” Mr. Foy said. “The best way to get off the front page for being a criminal and get on the front page for being a candidate is to hold a rally in the media capital of the world.”

Most people in Crotona Park on Wednesday morning seemed unhappy that Mr. Trump was coming. Maggie Rodriguez, 57, an electrician who was walking her Chihuahua in the park, cringed at the site of the Trump team setting up for the rally.

“We won’t have a democracy anymore,” if Mr. Trump is re-elected, she said. “God bless America.”

But the feeling was not unanimous. Erica Perez, 37, a store clerk, said she liked that Mr. Trump had referenced the Bible.

“I’m happy he’s coming,” she said. “When Trump was president, America was better.”

Arsenio Colon, 79, a retired maintenance worker, said he used to vote Democrat but now supports Mr. Trump and the Republican Party because he likes its tough stance on foreign policy with China.

“Anytime the Democratic Party is on top, this country has more problems,” said Mr. Colon, who lives near the park. “This country needs a strong president all the time.”

As workers set up a stage for Mr. Trump on Wednesday, a campaign representative asked a New York Times reporter to leave and threatened to call the police, asserting that the permit allowed the campaign to eject uninvited guests from the public park.

Karoline Leavitt, a Trump spokeswoman, said park security and law enforcement “are notified to assist” when an “individual refuses to leave the permitted area.”

Mr. Rivera, who has lived in the Bronx since 1958, said he would need no encouragement to leave the area once the rally begins.

“He’ll be lucky if he gets 35 people from around here to support him,” he said.

Michael Gold and Chelsia Rose Marcius contributed reporting.

Jonathan Weisman

The G.O.P. and the Secret Service clash again over the convention protest zone.

The Republican National Committee, alarmed by what it sees as a significantly worsening security threat, asked on Thursday that the director of the Secret Service personally intervene and grant a request to move a designated protest zone farther away from convention participants in Milwaukee this summer.

Republicans have demanded for nearly a month that the Secret Service push back the protesters from the convention site. Now, seven weeks before the start of the convention on July 15, a letter from Todd R. Steggerda, a counsel to the R.N.C., has raised the stakes.

“Your failure to act now to prevent these unnecessary and certain risks will imperil tens of thousands of convention attendees, inexcusably forcing them into close proximity to the currently planned First Amendment Zone,” Mr. Steggerda wrote to Kimberly A. Cheatle, the director of the Secret Service, referring to a designated protest site at Pere Marquette Park , a small public park on the bank of the Milwaukee River, about a quarter-mile from the arena hosting the convention.

In his letter, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Steggerda cited “an increased and untenable risk of violence” from a “rapidly deteriorating security environment,” and demanded that Ms. Cheatle intervene. The Secret Service is tasked with leading security for both major-party conventions this summer.

The Republican Party has previously argued that, in the current plan, those attending the convention will be forced to pass by the protesters on their way into the venue, increasing the opportunity for confrontation.

The Secret Service responded in a lengthy statement to Mr. Steggerda’s letter, saying that officials had held “multiple meetings” with the R.N.C. chairman, convention staff and concerned senators, but that the agency was “confident in the security plan being developed.”

Anthony Guglielmi, the chief of communications for the Secret Service, also castigated Mr. Steggerda for detailing security plans not yet finalized or released to the public, accusing him of jeopardizing the safety of convention-goers — precisely what Mr. Steggerda said he was concerned about.

“Publicly disclosing security information, as done in this letter, undermines our ability to maintain the integrity of our security plan and keep the convention, attendees and the public safe,” Mr. Guglielmi said.

Both parties are concerned about an acute political divide that has led to a sharp increase in threats of political violence . Much attention has been paid to expected protests — mainly from Palestinian rights activists — at the Democratic National Convention planned for August in Chicago.

But Republicans say the threat of violence has already emerged against supporters of their presumptive nominee, former President Donald J. Trump. A man set himself on fire last month in front of the Manhattan courthouse where Mr. Trump is on criminal trial, and on Wednesday, a suspicious package with two vials of blood prompted a lockdown at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington.

Some protesters have already vowed that they will not remain confined to the designated demonstration site in Milwaukee, just as some have said that they will not apply for permits in Chicago or be corralled there.

Some Milwaukee officials have also made it clear that they want the security perimeter to be as tight as possible to not interfere with the city’s summer activities, the most important economic time in Wisconsin.

Jeff Fleming, a spokesman for Milwaukee’s mayor, Cavalier Johnson, said the city was willing to listen to the concerns of convention planners. But he pushed back on Mr. Steggerda’s assertion that there was a “critical flaw” in the existing security plan.

“We recognize that the security zone is set based on the vast experience of all law enforcement partners,” he added. “If they were to say, ‘Oh, it has to be four additional blocks to the east or west,’ we would respect that decision. That is not what the law enforcement professionals are saying.”

Secret Service officials said the city, not the service, designates the protest zone.

“Our security perimeters are based on public safety metrics, including protective intelligence, risk and threat assessments,” Mr. Guglielmi added. “Our model is designed to ensure the highest level of security while minimizing impacts on the public.”

In light of the proximity of convention-goers to the protesters, Mr. Steggerda said the Secret Service should expand the convention’s walled-off security perimeter into Pere Marquette Park, and push the protest zone south about a half-mile to Zeidler Union Square, providing convention-goers “an essential — but modest — protective physical separation from the anticipated demonstrators.”

According to the letter, Secret Service officials have told convention planners that expanding the security perimeter would be legally impermissible — a point that Mr. Steggerda rejected.

“With less than two months before the convention and even less time before the U.S.S.S. finalizes the plan, it is imperative you take personal and immediate steps to fix this unacceptable flaw in the design of the security perimeter,” he wrote.

Maggie Astor

A political consultant who orchestrated fake Biden robocalls is indicted.

Grand juries in four New Hampshire counties have indicted a Democratic consultant who admitted to orchestrating robocalls in January that used an artificial-intelligence impersonation of President Biden to urge Democrats not to vote in the state’s presidential primary.

The consultant, Steven Kramer, faces about two dozen counts split between impersonating a candidate, a misdemeanor, and voter suppression, a felony. Each pair of charges is tied to a specific voter who received the robocall.

The indictments were handed up over the past month, and the New Hampshire attorney general, John M. Formella, announced them on Thursday.

Separately on Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission fined Mr. Kramer $6 million for trying to “defraud voters using call spoofing technology that violates the Truth in Caller ID Act.”

The F.C.C. also levied a $2 million fine against Lingo Telecom, the company through which the calls were routed, accusing it of “failing to follow our call authentication policies.”

Neither Mr. Kramer nor Lingo Telecom immediately responded to requests for comment.

The news of the indictments against Mr. Kramer was first reported by WMUR-TV in Manchester, N.H.

The criminal charges against Mr. Kramer — filed in Belknap, Grafton, Merrimack and Rockingham Counties — allege that he “knowingly attempted to prevent or deter” each voter from voting “based on fraudulent, deceptive, misleading or spurious grounds or information.” They also allege that, through his actions or another person’s actions for which he is legally responsible, he placed a call to each voter in which he “falsely represented himself as a candidate for office.”

Arraignments are scheduled in the four counties for June 5, 14, 17 and 26, according to charging documents provided by a spokesman for the New Hampshire Judicial Branch.

Mr. Kramer admitted in February that he had been behind the robocalls, which urged New Hampshire residents not to participate in the presidential primary in January because “your vote makes a difference in November, not this Tuesday.” The caller ID was falsified to show the number of a former chairwoman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party.

The former chairwoman, Kathleen Sullivan, praised the New Hampshire Justice Department on social media for its “fast work” and said she hoped the indictments served as a deterrent to similar robocalls in the future.

Mr. Kramer said he had hired Paul Carpenter, an itinerant magician and technology and marketing consultant, to produce the audio for the calls using an A.I. tool — a fact alluded to in the charging documents, which refer to Mr. Kramer being responsible for actions taken by another party.

Mr. Carpenter, who said in February that he had been unaware of how Mr. Kramer intended to use the audio, has not been charged.

Mr. Kramer claimed in February to have placed the calls in an effort to expose the dangers of A.I. in campaigns and to prompt regulatory action.

Mr. Carpenter disputed that claim, saying that Mr. Kramer had told him he wanted to assess the technology with an eye toward offering it as a service to future clients.

Mr. Kramer was working for Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota, then a candidate in the Democratic presidential primary, around the time of the robocalls. But both he and Mr. Phillips said the campaign had been unaware of his actions, which Mr. Phillips condemned.

Neil Vigdor

A House candidate pitched herself as a ‘renter.’ She also owns a $1.2 million home.

Maggie Tamposi Goodlander, a former White House aide to President Biden who is running for an open House seat in New Hampshire, is drawing attention for having pitched herself as a renter while she also owns a $1.2 million home.

“I am a renter, and there should be more renters in Congress,” Ms. Goodlander, a Democrat running in the state’s Second District, told The Boston Globe in her first interview as a candidate.

But that declaration comes with an asterisk: the home that she and her husband, Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, own in Portsmouth, N.H. Records show that the couple purchased that residence for roughly $1.2 million in 2018. A real estate listing website described the property as a “private oasis.”

Ms. Goodlander, who has deep political connections , had been teaching law at the University of New Hampshire and Dartmouth College after moving to Portsmouth, a seaside city, in 2018, but she returned to Washington to work in the Justice Department after Mr. Biden won the presidency.

The Portsmouth house is in a different district than the one that Ms. Goodlander is seeking to represent, though the state has only two. The house she rented just before getting into the race is in Nashua, N.H., in a district that runs the length of the state and includes all of its western portion.

There is no requirement for House members to live in the district they represent, though they must be a resident of the state they are representing at the time of their election.

The Daily Beast first reported on the million-dollar price tag of Ms. Goodlander’s Portsmouth home. A spokesman for her campaign did not immediately comment on Thursday.

Ms. Goodlander has dismissed concerns about her time spent living outside New Hampshire by underscoring her family’s deep roots in the state, which she also highlighted in a video announcing her candidacy . Her mother, Betty Tamposi, served as a Republican legislator in the New Hampshire Statehouse and ran for the same seat that Ms. Goodlander is now trying to win.

Ms. Goodlander said in her announcement video that Nashua “has been my family’s home for over a hundred years.” A home long owned by her family there was sold in 2008, according to the real estate website Zillow and public records.

That same year was the last time that Ms. Goodlander cast a ballot in the district that she is running to represent, voting absentee when she was an undergraduate at Yale University, records show.

The seat that Ms. Goodlander is running for is being vacated by Representative Ann McLane Kuster, a Democrat, who announced in March that she would not seek re-election.

The race, in a Democrat-leaning district, has drawn a long list of candidates from both parties. Becky Whitley, a Democratic state senator, and Colin Van Ostern, a former state executive councilor who managed Ms. Kuster’s first House campaign and was the party’s nominee for governor in 2016, are among those running in the Democratic primary.

The primary elections will be held in September.

Pizza deliveries and bodega stops: Trump’s Big Apple campaign.

Former President Donald J. Trump is accustomed to crisscrossing the country on his private jet, headlining rallies at big venues where he is met by roaring masses chanting his name. But often over the last month, his presidential campaign has ventured into politically hostile territory: New York City.

He stopped in to chat with the owner of a tiny Harlem bodega. He made an early-morning visit to a construction site in Midtown Manhattan, shaking hands with union members wearing hard hats and safety goggles. He delivered pizzas to and posed for snapshots with emergency workers at a firehouse just minutes away from Trump Tower.

You might be forgiven for wondering if Mr. Trump were actually running for mayor.

Since the start of his criminal trial in Manhattan on April 15, which requires he be in court for much of the week, Mr. Trump has held just three campaign rallies, only two of which took place in battleground states expected to determine the outcome of the election. He has made just as many modest stops in New York in front of smaller crowds.

The small-scale politicking, which New Yorkers are more accustomed to seeing from local politicians trying to gin up support, has been a study in contrasts to the raucous rallies that have defined his political brand since his 2016 campaign. And they have offered a markedly different atmosphere still from court, where Mr. Trump is bound by rules of conduct that keep him largely still and silent even as prosecutors accuse him of wrongdoing.

“It does feel like a local race,” said George Arzt, a longtime political consultant in New York City who once served as press secretary to Mayor Edward I. Koch . “It does feel like he’s almost going out there door to door.”

Mr. Trump, a born-and-bred New Yorker who moved to Florida in 2019, has repeatedly suggested these stops are part of a push to win his home state, which has overwhelmingly rejected him twice. But New York has not voted for a Republican president since 1984, and Democratic candidates defeated him by more than 20 percentage points in the last two elections. New York City itself is deeply Democratic.

Political observers and Trump aides have said that Mr. Trump’s campaign stops in New York City are as much about the message they are sending to a national audience as they are to New Yorkers. On Thursday, Mr. Trump is expected to return more to form, with a planned speech at a park in the Bronx that his campaign said it expected thousands to attend.

Brian Hughes, a campaign spokesman, suggested that the event, in Crotona Park, in a borough with large Black and Hispanic populations, would allow Mr. Trump to highlight to a national audience his strength among “voting blocs that you might argue are not traditional Republican voting blocs.”

Mr. Trump last month vowed that he would hold a rally at Madison Square Garden, the city’s marquee venue in Manhattan, meant for “honoring the police and honoring the firemen and everybody, honoring a lot of people.” Mr. Trump, who has been indicted in four cases, has repeatedly tried to showcase his support among emergency responders this year, including with his visit this month to a Manhattan firehouse.

Still, so far, Mr. Trump’s campaign visits in New York have largely been limited to small stops, ones that his advisers have said are borne somewhat out of necessity given the court schedule, which has generally allowed Wednesdays and weekends off.

On one Wednesday, Mr. Trump held rallies in Michigan and Wisconsin, two important swing states. He spent a Saturday at a rally at the Jersey Shore that attracted visitors from neighboring Pennsylvania, another key battleground. Yet even as Mr. Trump has lamented that the trial limits his ability to campaign, he has attended fund-raisers on some days when court was not in session, while on others, he has had no scheduled events.

Working within the trial schedule, Mr. Trump’s aides have also looked to use its constraints to their advantage. Advisers have argued that New York City, a diverse metropolis of more than eight million, offers an ideal backdrop for Mr. Trump to highlight issues he has made central to his platform, such as immigration, the economy and public safety.

“These same issues that are plaguing New York City are also plaguing all of the battleground states,” Jason Miller, a senior Trump adviser, said in an interview.

The Biden campaign has sought to capitalize on and draw attention to Mr. Trump’s scheduling limits. President Biden has been campaigning more often on Wednesdays , and he made light of the trial calendar in a video challenging Mr. Trump to debate . The campaign also began selling shirts with the slogan “Free on Wednesdays.”

Mr. Trump’s first campaign stop during the trial, just two days into the proceedings, was to a bodega in a heavily Hispanic area of Harlem that had been the site of a stabbing years earlier. The former president used the visit to highlight a set of overlapping issues and to build on his efforts to win over Latino voters.

After chatting with the store’s owner, Mr. Trump stood in front of cameras outside and criticized Mr. Biden’s economic policies as detrimental to small businesses. And fresh from appearing as a criminal defendant, Mr. Trump railed against the district attorney prosecuting him and Democrats in general for being overly lax on crime.

The visit drew more significant crowds than Mr. Trump’s other stops in the city. The blocks surrounding the bodega were lined with people standing behind police barricades hoping to catch a glimpse, some of them supporters and others merely curious.

That level of attention distinguishes the former president’s stops in the city from those made by most other politicians in and around New York.

Mr. Trump and his campaign have cited the onlookers as proof that he is politically popular in the city, particularly among Hispanics. Mr. Miller noted that the bodega’s neighborhood was an example of “communities that don’t normally have national political figures come and visit them.”

Other political observers have argued that the crowds in Harlem were more reflective of Mr. Trump’s celebrity status rather than agreement with his views.

“He is a celebrity first, and people are interested in him, even if they don’t agree with him,” said Bill de Blasio, a Democratic former mayor who ran a short-lived presidential bid for the 2020 nomination.

Still, Mr. de Blasio, a frequent Trump critic, acknowledged that the former president’s New York stops would help him broadcast his political message. And he noted that such retail politicking would energize any candidate — particularly one spending the day facing austere court proceedings.

Last month, Mr. Trump preceded his day in court with a visit to a construction site, where he shook hands with dozens of invited guests. Many were union workers. As he worked the line, people inside the construction site clambered on top of scaffolding and equipment to take photos and videos.

Hank Sheinkopf, a longtime New York political strategist who watched Mr. Trump evolve from tabloid fixture to celebrity to politician, said that such a stop was consistent with Mr. Trump’s decades-long effort to represent himself as the champion of working-class people.

“He is a guy who took tremendous pride in being able to be accepted by average working people,” Mr. Sheinkopf said. “He wants to make sure he doesn’t lose that touch. His appeal comes from being an elite who is not an elite.”

Nicholas Nehamas contributed reporting.

Reid J. Epstein

Reporting from Washington

As Trump campaigns in New York, Biden points Black voters to his rival’s past.

President Biden’s campaign on Thursday released a new advertisement aimed at Black voters . It comes as former President Donald J. Trump is planning a political event in the Bronx , a play by his campaign not necessarily to compete in New York State but to highlight Mr. Biden’s weakness with a key group of Democratic voters.

The ad will appear on digital platforms in New York City on Thursday, the Biden campaign said, and on television in battleground-state markets including Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Atlanta, Detroit and Macon, Ga.

What the ad says

It begins with Mr. Trump saying, “Of course, I hate these people” — a remark he made during a 1989 interview on CNN , referring to those who had been accused of a brutal rape of a jogger in what became known as the Central Park Five case.

Five Black and Latino men were wrongly convicted in the case, and at the time, Mr. Trump fueled racist reaction to the attack by taking out full-page advertisements in local newspapers, including The New York Times, calling for the death penalty to be reinstated .

Putting more than a little spin on the ball, the Biden ad uses that context to suggest Mr. Trump was saying in the 1989 interview that he hated all Black people. An ominous voice says: “Donald Trump disrespecting Black folks is nothing new.”

The clip then recounts Mr. Trump’s treatment of Black people: his family business’s documented bias at its rental properties decades ago; his response to the Central Park Five case; and his remarks as president defending white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va.

It closes as it began, with Mr. Trump saying, “Of course, I hate these people.”

What the ad is trying to do

The Biden campaign and its allies have for months struggled to reverse a decline in popularity with Black voters , particularly Black men.

By resurfacing Mr. Trump’s 35-year-old foray into the Central Park Five episode, Mr. Biden is trying to remind voters about a Trump past that they may have forgotten about or never been aware of to begin with.

It fits with the Biden campaign’s effort this week to disqualify Mr. Trump as unfit — Doug Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, on Tuesday called the former president “a known antisemite” — and it reflects a recognition that Mr. Biden’s North-Star message on abortion rights may need broadening to reach all the voters he will need to win in November.

Nicholas Nehamas

A former high-ranking Trump official meets with Arab and Muslim American leaders.

As President Biden’s support among Arab and Muslim Americans withers over his backing of Israel in the war in Gaza, former President Donald J. Trump is making a long-shot push to take advantage.

On Tuesday, Richard Grenell, a former high-ranking official in the Trump administration, met for more than two hours with a group of about 40 Arab and Muslim American leaders at an Italian restaurant outside Detroit. Mr. Grenell was joined by the former president’s son-in-law Michael Boulos, who is married to Tiffany Trump and is Lebanese American, though the Trump campaign said it had not organized the meeting.

Many Arab and Muslim American voters have said they are so angry with Mr. Biden over his Israel policy that they will sit out the election, despite supporting him in large numbers in 2020. But Mr. Grenell told the group that it had the chance to exercise extraordinary political power by backing Mr. Trump instead, according to six people who attended the meeting.

Mr. Grenell argued that if Muslim and Arab Americans publicly swung their support to the former president — and helped him win Michigan, a key battleground state — they would demonstrate to both Republicans and Democrats that they could not be ignored.

“The door is open to start to explore,” said Yahya Basha, a Syrian American radiologist from Royal Oak, Mich., who helped organize the meeting. “Let’s go approach and see what Trump has to offer.”

Dr. Basha and others present described the meeting as light on policy details and said they needed to hear more before committing to support Mr. Trump. Several others who attended were already Trump supporters, but some had cast their ballots for Mr. Biden in 2020.

Mr. Grenell, who served as Mr. Trump’s acting director of national intelligence, even asked the former president if he would address the group on speaker phone, but Mr. Trump called back only after the meeting had ended, according to Ali Abdelaziz, who manages fighters in the Ultimate Fighting Championship and attended the meeting as a guest of Mr. Grenell.

“He wanted to talk to everyone at the meeting,” Mr. Abdelaziz said of Mr. Trump. “But he thanked us and promised he would bring peace.”

Details of the meeting were earlier reported by the website NOTUS. Mr. Grenell declined to comment. Michael Boulos and his father, Massad Boulos, who also attended, could not be reached.

Despite the meeting, Mr. Trump is unlikely to win the support of a majority of Arab and Muslim American voters. He was a staunch supporter of Israel during his term in office, called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” as a candidate in 2015 and then carried out a travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries, which he has talked of reviving .

Mr. Trump’s outreach to Muslim and Arab Americans “is patently absurd, gullible to the extreme and supremely naïve,” said Keith Ellison, the Democratic attorney general of Minnesota, who is Muslim. “The one thing you can trust Trump to do is to say what he needs to say to get what he wants.”

Abbas Alawieh, one of the leaders of a movement among Democrats pressuring Mr. Biden to change his policy on the war in Gaza, said Mr. Trump was “looking to exploit and capitalize upon the deep pain of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim American communities right now.”

“They’re losers, and they can try all they want,” Mr. Alawieh said of the Trump campaign. “We won’t be taken as fools here in Michigan. Whether or not Trump makes gains here is really more dependent on whether President Biden comes out more forcefully against this war.”

But even a small swing in support toward Mr. Trump could prove crucial in what is expected to be a tight election decided by a handful of voters in a few battleground states.

And Mr. Biden is facing serious backlash from Arab and Muslim Americans over the war in Gaza. Prominent community leaders have said their communications with the White House have broken down in the absence of a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. During the Democratic primaries, the protest movement against Mr. Biden garnered significant support in states with large Arab and Muslim populations, including Michigan and Minnesota.

Still, the outreach effort from Mr. Trump’s team is in its early stages.

Brian Hughes, a senior Trump adviser, said the meeting was “not authorized, sanctioned or requested by the Trump campaign or President Trump.” But Mr. Hughes acknowledged that outreach was being made, saying that Arab and Muslim Americans make up a “disaffected Democrat voting bloc” and that “our campaign is working to communicate to that community how successful President Trump was in his term at establishing a more stable, peaceful Middle East.”

Ammar Moussa, a spokesman for Mr. Biden, called Mr. Trump “the biggest threat to the Muslim and Arab community.”

“He and his allies believe we don’t belong in this country, and Trump is openly speaking about allowing Israel to bomb Gaza without any regard,” Mr. Moussa said. “Trump and his campaign are racists and Islamophobes. Period.”

At the meeting, attendees described Mr. Grenell as saying that Mr. Trump would not call for an immediate and permanent cease-fire, a demand of many Arab and Muslim American leaders, with Israeli and American hostages still being held by Hamas. And he declined to commit to a two-state solution with Hamas still in charge of Gaza.

But he did argue that Mr. Trump would “muscle” his way to peace, ending a war that has claimed tens of thousands of Palestinian lives , five attendees said. He also defended Mr. Trump’s travel ban, saying it was a temporary measure narrowly targeted at nations that required “extreme vetting.”

At one point, Mr. Grenell expressed hopes that Gaza could eventually benefit from economic development, pointing out that it possesses a valuable waterfront on the Mediterranean Sea. (Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s other son-in-law, was criticized after making similar comments this year. Mr. Kushner also suggested that Palestinians be “moved out” of the territory.)

Those who attended the meeting said they expected Mr. Grenell to set up additional meetings, both in Michigan and other swing states. Several attendees also raised concerns over the long-running civil war in Syria.

Bishara Bahbah, who traveled from Arizona to Michigan for the meeting, said he was impressed that people with such close ties to Mr. Trump were making overtures.

“We had heavyweights there,” Mr. Bahbah said.

Jonathan Swan contributed reporting from Washington.

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