Personal Statement Hints

• The Admissions Committee is interested in learning more about you. When preparing your Personal Statement, please take the opportunity to share information about yourself that cannot be found elsewhere on the application. The Committee is particularly interested in your leadership achievements or service contributions to your high school or community.
• Write your Statement in Microsoft Word (of any other word processing application), perform a spell check, and save the final version as a plain text file. Saving the file this way will allow you to easily copy and paste it into the online application.
• We discourage you from writing your Statement in one sitting. Allow yourself ample time to draft and review your work before submitting your application. Remember to check the grammar and punctuation, as well as the spelling.
• Your Statement must be your own original work. However, it is certainly acceptable to have someone else review and edit your Statement or make suggestions concerning improvements you might make.
• To process your application in a timely manner, the Office of Admissions strongly recommends that essays be submitted in the appropriate section of the online admissions application. If this is not possible, essays that are sent separately must be submitted in a file format that can be opened using Microsoft Word 2003 or Acrobat 7.0 (e.g., file extensions doc, rtf, txt, htm, pdf). Documents submitted in other formats will not be processed.