Just out of my curiosity, I was wondering how many of you have already started with your personal statement? If so what questions you picked and how many word counts you have ?
Personally I haven’t started yet but will probably start drafting it this weekend!
Word count is limited to 350 words per question. I would assume most people would use most, if not all, of those 350 words. You don’t get to go over that word count.
@briank82 It’s interesting that with the new personal statement prompt, we essentially get higher cap on word count than the older prompt.
You do. I’m sure there are positive and negative aspects to it but I think overall it’s positive. Instead of writing an essay following a somewhat vague prompt where structure is really important and you need to worry about distributing 1,000 words between two prompts … you have several prompts which are much more specific.
It’ll be interesting to see how this year pans out. I applied last year though.
@briank82 Good point, I do like this style better as well. Each question is very specific and we don’t need to worry about how well the whole essay flows together quite as much.
I personally disagree. I’m a bit glad I had the old prompt to work with this last year. I didn’t consider it vague as much as I consider the new prompts limiting. There’s wouldn’t be enough space in 350 words for me to do much more than give them a straight, fairly predictable answer. This is, of course, what must be avoided.
Last year I made one of them a 350-word story about a piano recital I once had and the other a 650-word personal essay that I felt I had a lot of room (with respect to length and topic) for talking about what I wanted to and giving it the kind of tone I wanted. The longer it is, the more depth you can give to a passage.
That said, the most compelling and memorable statements are more often than not some of the shortest and most straightforward. It’s all in how you frame the thing you really want to say. It’s nice to work with an entirely new format though, this way there’s not as much pressure to find out “what are they looking for exactly in these personal statements,” or “which types of essays work the best?” It’s their first time working with these new prompts as well, so it’s really your choice as to how to approach them.