I recently wrote about the whole process of applying for graduate school. If you didn’t get a chance to read it yet, you can read the introduction to the series here. In that series, I wrote a little bit about the essays that may be required for applying to graduate school. Depending on the type of grad program you’re interested in, or the school you want to attend, you will probably need to write a personal statement, an essay with a prompt, or both–some grad schools might even ask for several essays and a personal statement.

Personal Statements

Personal statements are probably the most popular type of admissions essay. Generally, your personal statement is an autobiographical essay. However, beware of the term “autobiographical”; many hopeful grad students read that word and write their personal statements about where they were born and details about their families. People in graduate school admissions want to read more about topics that have to do with your professional and academic aspirations.

Admissions officers and advisors from grad programs are looking for essays that are about you, your past academic achievements, and your career goals. They want to know if their school will be right for you and if you will be right for their school. This also means that you need to write about the schools in your personal statement.

Include the name of the schools in areas of your personal statement that could boost the grad programs’ egos a little. For instance, you could include information about how a particular grad program will help you reach certain goals of yours and how you’d like to work with specific professors on their research projects. Read over this article from Peterson’s about other tips for your personal statement.

If you visit the articles page on our website, you can also receive other good tips for writing personal statements. We have an article that gives you practical tips for your writing and another one that is a checklist for you to use when you are close to finishing your personal statement. However, personal statements will likely not be the only type of essay that you’ll need to prepare for grad school admissions.

Admissions Essays

Aside from personal statements, you might be asked to include other admissions essays when you apply to grad school. These essays are different from personal statements in that personal statements don’t need a prompt for you to write. An application could just have a general prompt for your personal statement, but usually, other essays have more specific prompts. Grad programs might ask about specific achievements you’ve earned in your undergrad, or you might be asked about specific extra-curricular activities in which you are involved.

Many grad school hopefuls are nervous about what kind of essay prompts they might receive in certain grad program applications, so I took the liberty of looking up some common essay prompts. When you take a look at these different topics, think about drafting out short answers to them so that you can be even more prepared for when you fill out grad school applications.

Of course, you wouldn’t want to write out full essays for each of these topics, but if you just read through this list and get a basic understanding of the types of prompts that grad programs might ask you, then you’d be able to come up with some pretty good preliminary answers. Once you receive the real prompts, you’ll be able to develop your answers into real essays for your grad school applications.

Writing grad school applications can be stressful (especially the essay portions), but don’t let personal statements or other essays’ prompts scare you into either procrastinating writing your application or even deciding against applying for grad school. The reason grad programs give you essays is that they want to get to know you as a person instead of just a name with a GPA and a GRE score. If you’re still struggling with the concept of applying to grad school, visit About.com’s page that’s all for hopeful grad students who are thinking about applying for grad school. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments about this subject in the comment section below; I’d love to talk with you.