Criteria for Success
- Your personal statement convinces a faculty committee that you are qualified for their program.
- It convinces them that you are a good fit for their program’s focus and goals.
- You show a select group of skills and experiences that convey your scientific accomplishments and interests.
- Your experiences are concrete and quantitative.
- Your personal statement is no more than 2 pages. (Double check the program requirements to be sure)
Structure Diagram
The graphic above depicts a general layout for the sections of the personal statement, with an approximation of how much space each section generally covers. The section where you discuss your research experiences (yellow) is typically the longest because it provides concrete evidence of your qualified match for the program. The other sections function as an introduction (orange), a specific discussion of your interest in the research opportunities at the program or department (green), and finally your career goals (blue).
Purpose
The graduate school personal statement tells your story and demonstrates that you are a good match for a particular department or program. Matching goes both ways: they should be interested in you, and you should be interested in them. Your personal statement should make this match clear.
Analyze Your Audience
Your personal statement will be read by a graduate committee, a handful of faculty from your program. They’re trying to determine if you will be a successful graduate student in their department, a positive force in the department’s intellectual life, and a successful scientist after you graduate. They are therefore interested in your qualifications as a researcher, your career goals, and how your personality matches their labs and department.
The graduate committee probably reads hundreds of applications a year. To make it easy for them to figure out that you are a good fit, make direct, concrete statements about your accomplishments and qualifications. To make it easy for them to remember you, create a narrative that “brands” you.
Skills
Create a personal narrative
PhD programs invest in the professional and scientific growth of their students. Get the committee excited about investing in you by opening your essay with a brief portrait of what drives you as a scientist. What research directions are you passionate about, and why? What do you picture yourself doing in 10 years? If you decide to open with an anecdote, be sure it connects well to the rest of your narrative and avoids clichés.
Close your essay with a 2-3 sentence discussion of your career interests. How will graduate school help you achieve your goals? While the admissions committee knows that aspirations and goals can change over the course of your time in the program, it is better to choose one path for your personal statement and demonstrate you understand the path from their program to that goal, rather than listing all the potential post-program options. No one will hold you to this; this just helps your committee visualize your potential trajectory.
Describe your experiences
Experiences are the “what” of your essay. What experiences led you to develop your skill set and passions? Where have you demonstrated accomplishment, leadership, and collaboration? Include research, teaching, and relevant extracurriculars. State concrete achievements and outcomes like awards, discoveries, or publications.
When describing your research projects, include just enough background to highlight your accomplishments. Don’t spend too much space motivating the project itself—this is not a research proposal. Use technical language where appropriate; however, avoid jargon and acronyms specific to your sub-field. Faculty from research areas across the department may read your application. An exception to this general rule is if the specific application you’re writing for only asks for one essay. (E.g. Asking for only a “Statement of Purpose” rather than two individual “Personal Statement” and “Research Proposal” essays). In this case, you should include some more technical motivation and details of your research contributions if the space allows.
Quantify your experiences to show concrete impact. How many people were on your team? How many protocols did you develop? How many people were in competition for an award? As a TA, how often did you meet with your students? How did you improve your students’ experience with the class or learning outcome?
Describe actions, not just changes in your internal mental or emotional state. A personal statement is a way to make a narrative out of your CV. It is not a diary entry.
| Vague experience | Concrete experience |
| During this project, my mind was opened to the possibility of using different programming languages together to create code that is faster to run and easier to understand and modify. | During this project, I collaborated with other group members to develop a user-friendly Python wrapper for a 10,000-line Fortran library. |
| I showed initiative in my second project in the lab. | Frustrated with the direction of my first project, I consulted with other faculty and proposed an entirely new project. |
| During my first year, I became a more curious and capable scientist. | I explored the literature and proposed two alternative procedures to make the experiment efficient. |
| I won the physic department’s Laser Focus prize. | I won the physics department’s prize for top student among my cohort of 20 students. |
| I learned about the role of enzymes in cancer. | I quantified the kinetics of three enzymes implicated in cancer onset. |
Explain the meaning of your experiences
Meaning is the “why” or “so what” of the document. Why was this experience important to your growth as a scientist? What does it say about your abilities and potential? It feels obvious to you, but you need to be explicit with your audience. Your descriptions of meaning should also act as transition statements between experiences: try to “wrap” meaning around your experiences.
| Experience only | Experience and Meaning |
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Demonstrate match to your target program
Demonstrate an understanding of the program to which you’re applying and about how you will be successful in that program. To do this:
- Read the program’s website. See what language they use to describe themselves, and echo that language in your essay. For example, MIT Biological Engineering’s website talks about the foundational principles and broad-reaching goals of BE.
- Look for listed opportunities within the program or institution. These can include certificates, training programs, courses, student groups, partnerships with other institutes, and others. You may refer to these opportunities as you describe the match between the program and your interests and goals for graduate school.
- Get in contact with faculty or students in your target program. If you have had a positive discussion with someone at the department, describe how those interactions made you think that you and the department may be well-matched. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t get a reply, it isn’t anything personal, they may be busy or have a rule for themselves to not reply to inquiring students (this is sometimes written on the faculty’s lab website). Continue reaching out to other people in the program.
- State which professors in the program you would plan to work with. Show how their research areas align with your background and your goals. You can even describe potential research directions or projects. (Note that the expectations for this section may vary from program to program: programs where students rotate in several labs typically expect you to list 2-3 faculty, while programs where you are directly admitted to a lab may expect details on potential projects.
Last updated in Jan 2025
Resources and Annotated Examples
Annotated Example 1
These are selected sections from the personal statement that an MIT BE graduate student wrote in their successful application to MIT BE. 675 KB
Annotated Example 2
This is the personal statement from an MIT BE graduate student’s successful application to the MIT BE program. 11 MB