Hello everyone, so I recently discovered the NASA Community College Aerospace Scholars Program by an engineering professor at my community college, and feel that this program is a perfect opportunity to take the first steps into the aerospace industry. As a STEM student who’s keen on pursuing a mechanical/aerospace engineering major at a 4-year university, I decided to apply for the NASA program. I read through their personal statement prompt over the last 2 weeks and just finished creating my essay for it yesterday. (If anyone is curious, the prompt simply asks “Why are you interested in attending this NASA experience?”)
My current issue with writing (and pretty much every English essay I write) is that I have tendencies to either not be concise and direct, or to sugercoat & provide too much details to the point that I go over the word limit. Even more of a problem is that I suspect that the NASA prompt is asking for some kind of experience that conveys passion, motivation, curiosity, or even enthusiasm from the applicant. In my essay, I described how my passion for aviation shaped my gratitude, curiosity, and interest for pursuing STEM fields, and how it transitions (by including my future career plans) to me wanting to pursue NASA-related research. However, for an essay that has a 300 word limit, I’m heavily uncertain as to whether I can really distinguish myself as a unique applicant through my personal statement. I’ve done the best that I can to improve my essay by including vivid, active details for my experience and translating that into my desire for applying to the program. I’d like to “think” that my essay adequately describes my response to the question, but I “feel” that it sounds rather bland, generic, typical, and does not establish itself as an essay of high caliber. In all honesty, I’m afraid that once the reviewers take a look at my personal statement, they’ll quickly see that it hardly contains evidence of creativity, initiative, and other qualities which suggest my potential as a contributor to society.
I was wondering if anyone has ideas, advice, or insights into how I can express such qualities in a brief manner that doesn’t make me come off as rather boring or ordinary?