How to Write a Personal Statement for Graduate School
- Melchior Antoine
- Jan 11
- 10 min read
A statement of purpose or personal statement for graduate school differs significantly from a college essay for an undergraduate program. With a college essay, you have to focus on telling a compelling story that shows you as an interesting and creative individual who is prepared for college life and who is capable of personal growth and development. The graduate school personal statement focuses on your potential as a scholar and researcher.
The question becomes: Does this student have what it takes to complete their program and become a capable scholar? As a result, your personal statement should focus on giving that impression. Most graduate programs require that you complete a master’s thesis, where you achieve original research that has to be presented in front of a defense committee.
We rely on the insights of Vince Gotera in his article “How to Write a Great Statement of Purpose,” a guide or inspiration on how you should go about writing a personal statement for graduate school. In the process, we also look at a few examples of successful personal statements for graduate school.
What do you need for a successful personal statement?
A successful personal statement should cover your interests in the field, your past accomplishments as a budding researcher, and your future career goals. While a college essay for a graduate program relies more on your ability to shape a narrative or tell a story, a personal statement for a graduate program aims to show your preparedness as a scholar and your ability to excel in a specific field or career.
Bearing that in mind, in your personal statement, you should try to achieve the following seven impressions:
Your Passionate interest in the field
Your preparation, both academically and personally
Your ability to carry out research with practical and useful implications
Your ability to build effective working relationships with professors and fellow grad students
Your ability to articulate your future career direction
Now, you don’t necessarily have to write your essay in this way or include everything mentioned here. In fact, for graduate programs, they often give detailed information on what should be included in your personal statement, which should be carefully followed. However, this can serve as a guide when writing your personal statement.
Example of a personal statement for graduate school: MIT
The point of graduate school is to prepare you for life as a qualified scholar, researcher, professor, or gainfully employed individual. This means your personal statement should focus on proving that you have the scholastic or research discipline to build a successful career.
Also, research at the graduate level is a highly collaborative process. This means you should also highlight the professors that you have worked with and the projects that you have successfully collaborated on. Now, it doesn’t stop here. You don’t just focus on
To see how this is one, let us begin with an example of a successful personal statement from MIT included on their university website:
My mission as a researcher and teacher is to help people see beauty in the mundane through science as I do. I often find myself surprised by how much can be explained through mechanics, one of my academic interests since high school. The thrills of finding elegant solutions to complex problems and simple explanations for everyday phenomena are what continue to attract me to the field today.
From the very first sentence, the student effectively expresses their passion for the field by mentioning their mission statement in their chosen area of research. They want to show beauty in the mundane through science. Now, this is an almost poetic way of expressing oneself. In this first introductory paragraph, the student makes it clear that they have a deep and personal love for science.
They also make sure to link this passionate interest with their calling as a researcher and teacher, which lays the foundation for the focus on the career, which will be mentioned later in the article. In the second paragraph, the author provides vivid details of their research as an undergraduate student researcher:
Mechanics has been the common thread in my research over the past four years, but the breadth of the field has allowed me to take on projects ranging from micromechanics to biomedical engineering. My work in these relatively new and exciting areas along with encouraging supervisors have allowed me to push myself beyond the conventional undergraduate education and make great contributions to both basic and translational research. One such contribution was helping bridge the gap between micro- and macrotribology and understanding how small scale effects can manifest in large-scale applications such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Under the supervision of Prof. XXXX and Dr. XXXX at the University of XXXX, my project was to characterize the adhesion between AISI 440C stainless steel and an MoS2 -based lubricant used on spacecraft.
In the second paragraph, the student sets the theme with the first sentence. Mechanics is their broad field of interest, but they have undertaken a number of studies with a multifarious scope. The applicant goes on to describe these studies in detail, explaining both their significance in terms of how it directly relate to their narrow field of study and their practical application in the real world. An example of this practical application in the real world is when they describe how their work enabled the engineers working on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to gain a better understanding of the properties of a specific lubricant.
However, what is even more interesting is how the student describes the application of their studies in the non-scientific and everyday world:
In particular, the devices I worked on can reside in the stomach for days or even weeks and release medication, then reconfigure for safe passage after the patient drinks a prescribe volume of warm water. Thus, the devices minimize the burden on patients to remember to take their medication by giving them a single dose that lasts a relatively long time. This is especially helpful for patients living in developing countries or diagnosed with debilitating mental illnesses
The student here is describing how they worked on a particular project during his/her undergraduate studies that had practical applications in the field of medicine. By mentioning the vulnerable target populations — patients in developing countries and those who suffer from severe mental illnesses — that would most benefit from this novel technology, the student is demonstrating that their work has broader implications beyond science and beyond their discipline of mechanics.
There are many other amazing things about this graduate essay that we don’t have enough space to go into. You can find an annotated example of the personal statement on the MIT website here. Nevertheless, the table below shows what you can include in your personal statement to make it work based on the criteria I mentioned earlier:
Criteria | Why | Example |
Your Passionate interest in the field | College admissions officers have an overcrowded field of applicants to choose from. They will choose the student who shows the most passion, all things being equal. | The MIT student begins with a hook describing their interest in mechanical engineering, as the need to show the beauty of the ordinary world through science. |
Your preparation, both academically and personally | This shows that you're comptent and can complete your research, and by extension, your graduate program on time. | In our example, the student describes several successful projects that they completed. |
Your ability to carry out research with practical implications | This shows you know how to connect field research wih useful real-world outcomes. | The student provides details of the practical applications of their research in the field of medicine. |
Your ability to build effective working relationships | Study is collaborative, and you should show how effective you are at working with senior researchers and peers | The student mentions the names of several researchers with whom they successfully collaborated. |
Your ability to articulate your future career direction | This shows that your past choices in study and research relate both to your present and future pursuits. | The student clearly explains how their decisions were deliberate and careful and how the expertise in MIT could help grow even further in that direction. |
The importance of mastering the art of conciseness
Reading the MIT example of a personal statement, you get away with the impression that the essay is difficult to write. It’s not because the topic or subject being discussed is a highly advanced field of science. A student with a background in this type of topic will not find this subject particularly difficult.
The main reason is because of how concise it is. The essay is relatively short for the dense amount of detailed information that it provides. Such a challenge is unavoidable for an aspiring graduate student in any field, whether it be an advanced science, the social sciences, or the humanities. This is a trait that is typical of academic or research writing. It is what you expect in the abstract of a published paper or in a research proposal.
The student most likely began with a longer essay, which they spent a lot of time deciding what to leave out, emphasize, and include. The essay is approximately 1000 words long. However, in addition to their passion for their field of mechanics, they provide other information, such as:
Specific details about the research that they have taken part in
The awards and recognition that they receive for their work
The names of the professors and researchers with whom they have collaborated,
The practical applications of their research
It's honestly a lot. What does this mean for writing your personal statement? Well, it means that you have to spend a huge amount of time organizing information in a way that is compelling and that allows you to determine what should be included and left out. This is where your storytelling ability comes into play.
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Using storytelling techniques in your personal statement
Unlike an undergraduate college essay or personal statement, a personal statement for a master’s thesis relies less on storytelling ability and more on showing your aptitude as a researcher. Nevertheless, considering how crowded the field of applicants can be for any given graduate program, your storytelling ability may very well be what gives you an edge over others.
Storytelling technique in a personal statement is closely associated with your ability to express your passion for your field and explain how your research applies to the real world. More importantly, it can help you take all your miscellaneous experiences in life, research, and work and tell a complete and coherent story that can convince college admission officers that you can be a successful student who will also be an outstanding representative of the school. Let’s look at our MIT example to see how they use storytelling techniques in their personal statement.
Remember, in the introduction of the college essay, the student describes their mission is to “help people see beauty in the mundane through science as I do”? They don’t forget to come back to this, close to the end of the essay. Here is the last paragraph:
Above all else, a MIT PhD would help me achieve my long term career goal of becoming a professor, the position in which I can best see myself accomplishing my mission to show others the hidden beauty in everyday life through science. I feel ready to step into a challenging PhD program, and I owe it to those who have helped me reach my potential thus far—my community of family, teachers, and friends—to continue improving myself, make my mark in science, and inspire other through my unique worldview. I would be honoured to make MIT a part of that community yet again.
The student is describing that their ultimate career and life goal is to become a professor, and not just any professor. They want to “show others the hidden beauty in everyday life.” This works on three levels. It obviously achieves continuity with the very first sentence mentioned in the personal statement. Second, it expresses their genuine passion and love of science. Lastly, it flatters in a subtle way the target audience of the personal statement. The college admissions officers who read the article more likely than not are MIT professors who similarly love science and mechanical engineering.
Of course, many other graduates would have a similar career goal to become professors. However, only a rare few would describe it as passionately or uniquely as showing others the hidden beauty of everyday life through science. By doing so, the student is subtly appealing to the unspoken and intrinsic values that they share with any professor who teaches in this field of science as a discipline. This is not outrightly stated, but exists as subtext, which itself is a storytelling technique.
That being said, it is also important to specifically mention how the school is a part of your story. You do so by mentioning the professors and researchers at the school whom you plan to work with. You need to do your background research on these professors. You can even think of communicating with them via email or face-to-face if possible. Your familiarity with their work should not come across as vapid or something you gleaned while doing a quick Google or AI search. Here is how the student deals with this question in their essay:
Looking toward my future, I believe that graduate studies at MIT would foster my passionfor understanding the world we live in through the lens of mechanical engineering. In particular, Prof. Bischofberger’s work deeply speaks to me given that it has to do with patterns in nature and scientific beauty, even more so because it is anchored in fluid mechanics and soft matter. That being said, I could also see myself working with Prof. Chen or Prof. Wang, whose research on nanomaterials stands to benefit society in a direct way through improving the way we extract, convert, and use energy. In my opinion, materials are the cornerstone of any good technology, so I would be eager to develop and characterize a new class of materials with their guidance.
This is a brilliant touch. The student mentions two professors. The first has works related to “scientific beauty,” which ties in with the theme of helping people see the beauty of everyday life through science. The second professor works in nanomaterial science, which offers an opportunity to make practical contributions. Thus, the applicant shows both their familiarity with the work of these two professors, while demonstrating how their selection ties in with their own passion and practical experience in mechanical engineering research.
References
Gotera, V. (2006). How to Write a Great Statement of Purpose. University of Northern Iowa. https://www.scribd.com/document/178755057/How-to-Write-a-Great-Statement-of-Purpose-pdf
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Statement of Purpose for Graduate School. https://mitcommlab.mit.edu/meche/commkit/statement-of-purpose-for-graduate-school/
Cite this EminentEdit article |
Antoine, M. (2026, January 11). How to Write a Personal Statement for Graduate School. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/personal-statement-for-graduate-school |
