Common Application: Personal Statement
Please write an essay (250 words minimum 500 words maximum) on a topic of your choice or on one of the options listed below. This personal essay helps us to become acquainted with you as a person and student, apart from courses, grades, test scores, and other objective data. It will also demonstrate your ability to organize your thoughts and express yourself.
1. Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.
2. Discuss some issue of personal, local, national, or international concern and its importance to you.
3. Indicate a person who has had a significant influence on you, and describe that influence.
4. Describe a character in fiction, a historical figure, or a creative work (as in art, music, science, etc.) that has had an influence on you, and explain that influence.
5. A range of academic interests, personal perspectives, and life experiences adds much to the educational mix. Given your personal background, describe an experience that illustrates what you would bring to the diversity in a college community, or an encounter that demonstrated the importance of diversity to you.
6. Topic of your choice.

UPenn: Essay
Ben Franklin once said, `All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move.` Which are you? (Please answer in 300-500 words.)

474-word version
“Son, you know how much I love you right?” This is what my father said before he told me that we would be moving to Shanghai, China after I finished my first semester in 8th grade. I was only 13 years old, but it was then when I first decided to become a person of initiative...