that early decision deadline is coming up fast November 1st is right around the corner and if you're interested in applying to Ivy League and bsmd programs the majority of your applications in general will need to be submitted within the next one to two months in light of that your personal statement is your most important essay now as a student that's been admitted to multiple ivy league and bsmd programs who's seen success in this I feel like there's value in me going over my personal statement so in this video I'm going to go ahead and read
through my entire personal statements I'm going to go through step by step about all the little details and touches that I added to my essay that made it come out at the Quality that it did I think it's a very very solid essay I think some of the essays that you read out there online are either like unbelievably creative or they take a direction that nobody else could really learn from but my essay is something that I feel is a strong strong essay but it also reflects like an actual human's personality it's it's not like
written by some unbelievably gifted like English student it's just written by a regular guy who tries his best to be funny and clever in the essay and you can tell put in the work into it right now you're looking at a Google slides with my entire essay like pasted out into different slides I did that so that we can go through like each of the different sections and explain how I began my introduction my hook how I closed out the essay that kind of stuff now on the first slide here I left this blank on
purpose you see how it says click to add title so one of the debates that goes on in this essay writing process is whether or not you should have a title on your essay now if you're a real one on this channel and you've seen my old essay writing video you'll know that I wrote two personal statements and in my first personal statement which was the original one that I wrote between my 10th and 11th grade summer on that essay I actually had a title because I I really really wanted to to add one that
was um clever I feel it encapsulated like the message of the essay and I feel like there was a connection between the title and the body but here's the thing on my main personal statement the essay that you're going to read right now that I used for 95 percent of schools I didn't add a title why pratik why didn't you add a title well here's the thing before I go into the actual essay and I read it I want you guys to drill down on this point of tone it is so so important that when
your mission reader opens your essay and they read your essay they actually get a voice for who you are now that's all cool on paper but what does that actually mean well the thing is when you write your essay it's the little details that give it personality the words themselves don't have meaning unless they're stitched together in a way that connects to the reader and so one of those little details comes out to be the title if you're just having a regular conversation with someone you wouldn't like title that conversation that description right adding a
title gives it kind of a more formal tone to it it feels like the essay is more rehearsed if you will versus an essay without a title that's a little bit more free-flowing and actually like a personalized right it's a personal statement that might have a little bit more of a a connection a touch to it and that's why I just left the slide blank as a way to like symbolize me not having a title okay now let's get into the actual essay I'm gonna read through the entire thing so you get the full experience
and then we'll break down each section a horrendous screeching sound from Beyond my bedroom window shatters my peaceful sleep I peek at my alarm clock it's 4 30 a.m I groggly turn over and sink back into my dream my thoughts drifting to an imaginary world where I'm actually six feet tall and no longer have to round up a few moments later the cacophonous cry returns I roll out of bed and stumble towards the window perched on a tree branch directly outside is a small dark-colored bird is this delicate creature the culprit the bird looks back
at me and then releases the most obnoxious cry yet I slammed the window shut but its infuriating cause continued to ring in my ears Disney movies falsely portray morning Birds they're boisterous rebellious and issuing them with a breach of noise citation is unfortunately not an option these birds had pestered me for weeks and I wanted them gone I tried jumping and shouting under their tree no reaction I placed a large plastic goose in my yard the birds were unfazed I drew Predator faces on balloons but only scared the children passing by clearly my feathered Rivals
were smarter than I thought to successfully relocate the birds I needed a different approach I thought back to my science experiments and the technical problems I spent hours debugging the answers were always right in front of me I just had to look more carefully I stopped taking immediate action against the birds instead I simply watched I jotted down their behavior in the morning evening and periodically throughout the day as in my research the solution became clear the birds were creatures of habit I noticed that they perched on my bedroom tree every evening and left after
their morning raucous if I could briefly change their go-to perching tree they may acclimate to the new location and permanently shift there my observation didn't directly solve the problem but it provided a crucial starting point for innovation to lure the birds I installed a bird feeder on a distant tree but quickly realized a conventional setup was too rudimentary for the job the birds would fly to the feeder eat their meal and then return right back to my bedroom tree they needed a reason to stay on the feeder tree and after a week of meticulous engineering
coding and woodworking I gave them one I rigged an electronic Arduino controller to a motorized bird feeder to dispense small amounts of sunflower seeds at regular intervals to reward the birds for staying away my bedroom was silent by the end of the week I rejoiced on my solution to a practical problem after weeks of turmoil I finally had my first night of peace of sleep but when I awoke it was still dark outside I snuck a look at my alarm clock it was 4 30 a.m as I laid wide awake on my bed I came
to a stinging realization I missed those noisy birds it's good like it's objectively a good good essay and so there's a couple things that we can now do to go ahead and break down the pros and the cons of what we just witnessed let's kick things off with the big ticket items the things that everyone needs to get correct one of the things that really really stands out in my essay is the opening and the closing you need to make sure that you hit home on both of these and I'm a really really big advocate
for doing so if we move back to the start of the essay notice the very first sentence here a horrendous screeching sound from Beyond my bedroom window shatters my peaceful sleep we can talk about like the little things that make that sentence engaging right the use of the word horrendous right it's like a stimulating word it's not like some overly dramatic thing but it gets you interested okay what does he have to say and then it's like a good quality length sentence that gets you engaged in it a lot of times people really go wrong
in the introduction and there's two big ways that you absolutely cannot do if you are subscribed to my channel number one you can't use a quote bro I don't care what quote it is or how well you think that quote fits into your essay how are you gonna start your essay using someone else's words it's not even yours like even if it's your your dad's your moms your grand great grandfather who cured every disease in the world but you cannot start using their words because it's your essay it's about you not them that's why you
can't use a quote next thing if you go and look up like advice online people will tell you to start your essay with like some kind of like action you know we got bang as I kick the soccer ball into the goal yo like bro are we in the second grade like I remember right if you go through my old journals from when I was six years old I used to write like that you know how corny that is like just just think about it for a second bro a lot of you are applying to
college 18 years old you were a grown men and women starting your essay with like an onomatopoeia like a sound like that's straight goofy I we're not doing that around here there's a couple different ways you can open your essays right what you want to do is you want to go to this website here I'm gonna put a link on here it's called crack sat read some of their essays they're some of those essays are beautiful their kids who have gone into Ivy League schools and other top programs watch how they open their essays take
a look at how I open my essay these are different styles that can have that same gripping effect without having it be repetitive or corny to an admissions reader that has to read like thousands of these a year the next thing we need to touch on now is the ending now the ending of an essay um like this ending was clever okay and the thing about the ending is I always try to keep it something clever something fun because that way it leaves the reader on like a good taste and so even if the middle
of the essay when you're in the uh you know sixth sentence of paragraph three it's a sentence that's not like the most crazy engaging thing if you end it on the right Tone It generally gives people a better perception overall of your essay so don't skimp out on the ending now for me I actually for this particular essay came up with the ending before I wrote the essay it was like I had the idea seed for the essay and I'm gonna like finish this video talking about like coming up with the ideas but when I
jotted my outline I might not have had all the points that I make in like these middle paragraphs but at the end of my outline I wrote how like this kind of idea it wasn't formulated like out exactly like this but how how I wanted to tie back the idea of me missing the morning birds and how I think that would be like a funny clever ending and I had written that out and I ended up doing that and so I value and prioritize the introduction in the ending so much that I was willing to
make that one of the core points of my outline going into this it's a clever feel good closure and it's something that you could definitely go ahead and try in your own essays next let's talk about the messaging of the essay that's probably one of the most important things here right what does the essay tell us now here's the thing there's a couple key things about this essay that maybe you might not even discern it on your first time around hopefully you were able to but to an admissions officer that does this as their job
they absolutely wouldn't be able to pick these things out now my story broadly in my entire essay is that I am like a researcher student that's my thing I go to rpi's physician scientist program so one of the things that I'm pitching to schools is that I am a natural uh researcher that's my passion that's what I'm good that's and it's who I am it's part of my identity and so being a researcher is a core to this you'll notice that if we come down to this like uh third paragraph We have a sentence here
I thought back to my science experiments the technical problems I spent hours debugging now you'll notice that like this is kind of the first reference to me even doing science fair stuff it lines up with the rest of my resume where science fair is my top extracurricular I have all these science fair Awards uh science fairs are a big uh part of my life and so I I reference that in my essays and if you notice that as we go through the essay a lot of the core of the essay is really just an effort
in problem solving it's like almost uh analogous to when you're in the lab you have some kind of problem and how you try different things they usually don't work out that's how research works and then finally you come up with some clever solution to the problem that uh you know goes ahead and it solves it and now you know everything is good you're on to the next problem that's what's kind of the core of the essay it's proving to colleges that I am that researcher sure and so an admissions officer reads that and they they
figure that out like okay this kid has some kind of intuition it shows that I'm clever right in the ways that I go about solving this bird's problem shows that I'm persistent I'm not giving up after a couple attempts and at least to me one of the most important things is that it shows that I'm doing it for myself if you were to write the same essay about a different topic you were to say oh I have this non-profit there's these poor people in India and they struggle with these you know coughing lung infections and
so I've devised the solution to help them out it's not the same you some people who are not taking the time to really understand what these essays are about would pick that essay over this they're like oh I did this cool thing and it helps so many people but the truth is that this essay shows something else right it shows that being a researcher is who I am and this problem this had didn't have any impact on anyone else nobody cared I was not solving some strange neighborhood crisis I just did it because it was
annoying me and so I took the skills that I had and I applied them to a problem in my life out of my own volition nobody had to force me to do it and in the eyes of a college admissions counselor I feel that that has a lot of weight because it shows them one of the most important characteristics that they're looking for in a student and it's that they're intelligent they're smart they can actually if problems come up or if they want to be able to solve some bigger problem in the future they have
the true capability of doing so they don't have to mark themselves to the college and show these different uh you know examples that are already out there right I already have those other big things on my essay been able to show how I'm able to do it even on a small level and that conveys intelligence next on the list we have the tone of the essay as a whole you remember I brought this up at the start of it but now that you've read through and you've seen my essay now you can start to get
a perception of what that means with the tone I keep the vocabulary varied and I keep it engaging and I think one of the best examples of this that comes out in the essay is the way that I just described the birds if we come back to like just the start of the essay okay just think about this a little bit broadly for a sec imagine if I wrote the entire essay using only the word Birds no adjectives no synonyms just Birds would be one of the most detrimental things I could do to this essay
it would go from being a gripping essay to being a boring essay why pratik why does it have such a big difference well the thing is it's those little changes in the varied vocab that give it that engagement if someone says the same word over and over instantly our brain is able to catch it and we get bored of it and so notice how I switch things up if we come to the very first section I use the word delicate creature here if we come to the next slide um down here um it's somewhere here
I use the word feathered Rivals right you can see how in every section I'm switching these things up I use adjectives to describe the birds that's what gives the essay the personality right and those weren't like the easiest things to do like when I came up with the term feathered Rivals like I mean that was unique to me that was clever like I was I was excited when I did that and it gave the essay just that little extra punch to push the tone into something that the admissions off officer is just they're hungry for
they want to keep learning more about what the essay has to offer clearly my feathered Rivals were smarter than I thought it would be so boring without that when it comes to something like humor my personal philosophy is that you don't force it you don't write your essay and say okay I'm gonna open it and have three jokes in the first paragraph and then I'm gonna have one in the middle two in the co like it's not a recipe book here you go ahead and you write the essay and you find things that could be
funny and you make jokes out of them that's the way that I approach it so when I'm going ahead and I write the essay usually I don't start by even like adding any jokes in there but I'll have little things that in my mind I can say okay this could be funny I could make a joke out of this I could do something clever with this if you come to the first paragraph here I say something like um I groggly turn over and sink back into a dream my thoughts drifting to an imaginary world where
I'm actually six feet tall and no longer have to round up now if you're reading out loud in your head that's authentic you can see how like like in real life right now right I'm not over six feet tall I'm like 5 10 maybe 5 10 and a half on a good day when I'm in my forces so when I say something like I'm actually six feet tall like this is authentic to who I actually am I do have to be that guy that's like rattling up a little bit so it comes out as like
funny it's clever and I knew that when I was writing the essay that I had this you know I sink back into my dream I wanted to say something about the dream and I knew okay I can do something clever with this I can do something funny here and so I made a little note of it I came back I wrote a little joke if humor is not really your thing like you're writing your essay and you have like your parents editing it and your jokes just don't hit you don't have to be funny like
that's not the only way to go about it but I felt that the humor really matched the tone of my essay like when I'm talking about these morning Birds there's a little bit of like a Ridiculousness to it right it's not like some like very deep problem and so humor matched that cone and so I I rolled with it now some of my essays have humor and I think that's a tone that comes throughout a lot of essays in my like overall portfolio of what I applied to college with but not every single one you
use it when it feels necessary but it's more of a skill you should have in your bag rather than something you have to force everywhere my last touch in general with tone is that notice how in this essay um you know with all due respect to all the other essays out there I don't mean to to bash on anyone's story but there are no like Mindless bragging situations that come up here there's no like deep sob story about how I went through so much hardship in my life I've lived like a very like good quality
enriching like privileged life up till this point right I let's keep it a stack like a lot of us if you're watching this video we've not had to deal with adversity on the level that some people have I was watching like I was reading the comments on like some other YouTube video on College apps and some kid talks about how he grew up with like his parents house being bombed and his both of his parents passed away from that and now for like many years after that he had like a strong fear of like loud
sounds like do you know understand like how horrible something like this could be like have a little bit of empathy towards those people so when I think about that and then I think about my own life there's absolutely no comparison there so why even try like why even try to bring up whatever like little hardships that are there and Bash myself into the category as those people you have to realize that when admissions people are looking at your application holistically if you're going to go down that path they're going to evaluate you with other other
kids down that path as well that's the only way they can compare apples to apples so unless you have something like that happen I personally don't believe you should even try going down that pathway instead I'd rather use my strengths to my advantage right I'm clever I can be funny in these essays and I write with an engaging tone so why not bring an essay that highlights those characteristics rather than trying to like force those other things in and now in here a lot of times your parents will really be the people culprits of this
but they'll ask you to like brag more like when I bring up uh science fair here you know how easily this sentence could have turned into me referencing my epilepsy research me referencing my lab research me referencing my papers my patents my national level Awards my scholarships bro the list goes on with things that I could have stuck here in this paragraph but yet I keep it to an absolute bare minimum because I know that the admissions officers have already seen what I have to show in those departments why bring it up again here it's
just the anxiety in you that makes you feel like you need to bring it out trust me you don't if you keep it to a minimum there is a sense of value that comes out of it even if you don't initially see it only bring up those achievements if they're genuinely unique to the situation and if they actually have a role within the essay they contribute to moving it Forward rather than just being there to brag let's shift angles here pacing is something that's often not talked about enough but it's also something that's important when
you're writing your essays this essay if you guys maybe noticed it's a little bit shorter it's a little bit shorter this is a common app gives you 650 words this essay was just under 500 words it was 499. that's on the shorter end of what you'll see typically you want to aim for an essay that's with around like 550 to 600 words you can use the 650 if you really need it but you know you don't want to board the admissions officers with an overly long essays so my essay here is 500 words but yet
it conveys everything that it needs to be it doesn't have to be any longer than this it I tried I tried adding an additional paragraph other things to maybe like give it a little bit more depth with the space that I had left and yet none of those things really hit like they didn't give it an extra feel or in my opinion any value they really just broke the flow of the essay and so because of that I kept it at 500 words and it worked out perfectly you don't have to make your essay any
extra longer or shorter than it needs to be here is one of my absolute best tips for being able to get the pacing of your essay correct while also having consistency and concision in what you write what I used to do is when I had any essay Let's ignore the Common App essay just for one second and take a look at our supplemental essays here when they say you have like 300 words to write you need to use all 300 words like generally speaking because that's not too much space that they give you and you
have a lot to say what I'd always do is I'd overshoot my writing I know that personally I write with a little bit of fluff in there it's just my way of getting my words down onto paper and a lot of people are very similar to me so instead of writing to 300 words what I do is the word count is 300 words I'd give myself 350 words 375 words and I'd write the essay within that bound after the essay is completely done and it's written then during my revision I'd go back and I'd remove
redundant phrases sentences ideas and I just work very hard and it's not the easiest thing in the world to do when you have 375 words you'll be able to get it down to like 350 325 and those last couple like bits you'll be like kind of struggling to find where else can I remove an extra word can I be more concise it's during that difficult phase where some of your best writing actually comes out because now you're truly able to Crunch your ideas down into as few words as possible and that way when someone else
reads it every sentence has meaning it's gripping if you read through my essay right now this essay was originally written as a supplemental essay for a Penn State University bsmd program prompt that was 500 Words long it was also I think there's a Case Western one that was also 500 words so I needed this to get under that threshold every single word in here has like meaning each sentence pushes the essay forward and if you were to remove one of the sentences from here it would lose meaning in the overall essay and that's the level
that you want to get your writing to and by overshooting your writing and then cutting back I feel like it's a great recipe to be able to do that consistently if you've stuck with me this far into the video you're a real one and I know how much like at this point if you've been watching all the way through how much you want to have a good quality personal statement you're taking this advice seriously and so I'm going to give you my final tip which is generally one of my best tips for idea generation and
being able to come up with those like brilliant little Sparks that lead to essays like like these and in general some of the best essays out there all you need to write some of the most beautiful essays out there are idea seeds the seeds are not things that you can just sit down in a brainstorming session and come up with seeds are things that hit you in your everyday life so what you're going to want to do is I want you to take your phone right now open up a notes file and just call it
college essay seeds and then what you're going to do is when funny interesting things happen in your life unique things happen you're just going to open that notes file and you're going to write it down it doesn't need to even be anything crazy it just needs to be an observation that you had if something in your Consciousness pops up some observation you have about something just open that Notes app and write it down you just need to get into the habit of consistently writing it so we're going to start from there over time you're going
to accrue different seeds in that notes file and then one day when you want to do your actual essay writing right it's been like a a few weeks of uh having seeds even if it's just been a couple of days of having seeds just pop up you're going to do your essay writing section on a Saturday morning you can open that that Notes app and you're gonna find the best ideas in there and you're going to think about how those could potentially form essays from there the thing about my morning Birds essay was this the
original idea that I had written down in my notes app as a seeds thing was that like well I woke up on like a Saturday morning to these annoying birds like this is not a piece of like fiction right these birds actually did exist and they were very annoying so I woke up and I was like yo like why do they always show birds chirping being like such a cool thing in movies like it it's actually ass like in real life it's so annoying to have Birds just constantly like outside your bro it's it's not
nice and so I just wrote that down in my notes file like movies falsely portrayed morning Birds they are annoying I don't like morning Birds I want to get rid of these that's all I had written down like it's just in couple words and I just had that thing sitting in my notes file for like a little bit and then one day like the essay idea just kind of like it hit me I realized how I could turn that seed into an essay and what you have to realize is that on paper if I just
told you that seed idea right now it wouldn't sound like a super a great essay if I took this essay that I just read out to you I summarized into a couple of sentences yeah I wrote my college at personal statement about like these morning Birds that's on my room they're kind of like annoying me and so I had to wrote about like the process in which like I took them and I moved them to my backyard so that they wouldn't they would stop annoying me like that doesn't sound like a great essay does it
like that's the and that's the thing about it it doesn't sound like a great essay but in reality it's amazing like most people who would look at that essay and say oh that doesn't sound like a great essay they wouldn't be able to write essays that are as good as this essay is and so even if the ideas don't seem like they would be amazing in the moment there is a difference when you write things that you're interested about when you write about things that you truly have a passion for the quality of the writing
the way that you you write with conviction it just comes out differently it hits different and that's why like when I wrote about this idea I was excited about it I had some fun doing it I was able to joke around and within the span end of like the two to three maybe a little bit more weeks that I spent just drafting this essay I was able to come up with like this this piece of art in my eyes and that's why I want you guys to be able to do as well so try it
out right find these little idea seeds find something that excites you a little bit as long as it doesn't bore you like you're on the right track but usually you should be like a little bit excited like oh shoot that was a great idea maybe I could do something with that you let it sit for a day you come back to it you write that's when the most beautiful asses will come out of it you have to trust me like all the advice that you see online about people who do these college essay things if
the advice is like super easy to take usually it doesn't actually yield like super good results this essay is a this like this advice that I'm giving right now is a little bit more tricky to do is something probably new to you but I'm telling you it's going to get you some banging essays just go ahead and Trust the process thank you all so much for watching this has been your boy pratik like comment subscribe share the video take care
