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.

 

500-word version:
There is one question that especially seniors consider commonly around this time of the year. ‘Why?’ ...Why go to college when all the information necessary to acquire knowledge is attainable from and at the Internet and the public library, respectively, for almost no cost at all...

 

U of Chicago: Take as a model Options 1 through 4 as you pose and respond to a prompt of your own. Please do not submit an essay written for the Common Application. Your prompt should be original and thoughtful. Draw on your best qualities as a writer, thinker, visionary, social critic, sage, sensible woman or man, citizen of the world, or future citizen of the University of Chicago; take a little risk and have fun.

 

 

There is one question that especially seniors consider commonly around this time of the year...

 

U of California-Berkeley: Tell us about a personal quality, talent, accomplishment, contribution or experience that is important to you. What about this quality or accomplishment makes you proud and how does it relate to the person you are?

 

4 Cs, Curiosity leading to Contemplation and then to a Comprehensible Conclusion, represent who I am in a nutshell and they have also led me to the ensuing inquiry...