I have been working on my personal statement for a while now and would like to clarify one thing. The prompt says "In a well-developed essay of 300 to 500 words, discuss: (1) Describe what led to your initial interest in the naval service and how the Academy will help you achieve your long range goals, and (2) Describe a personal experience that contributed to your character development and integrity." However, as my draft stands now, it FIRST discusses my personal experience, then the story of my initial interest and long range goals. I did this because it is the correct chronological order and therefore, the most logical order in my mind. Also, the chronological order makes it a little easier to understand the actual content IMO. Will be okay in this order, or is it required that applicants structure their essay in the order given by the prompt?
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Personal Statement Question
- Thread starter kbye2020
- Start date
Zach Blackburn
Member
- Joined
- Dec 25, 2018
- Messages
- 25
I am no expert personal essays, however, my two cents would be not to spell out your answer to both. As a current applicant of 2024, I also struggled with perfecting my essay, how to best reflect my personal life, motivations, and academic writing style. My class in AP Literature spent about 2 Weeks reading over essays that were unique or different enough that Admissions noticed it enough to accept them. I had this same teacher review my own essay and I had to scrap it many times as I was too focused on directly answering both questions in order, or at least spelling it out for admissions.
Once Again, no expert here so take my words with a grain of salt, but I do want to see everyone succeed. I won't detail what I put exactly in my essay but I chose to focus on the second part of the prompt, choosing to focus on an event where I showcase character growth that the Academy would be unaware of when just looking at my application. Here I loosely spelled out through my character growth moment how the Naval Academy would help me achieve the new long-range goals brought forth by this lesson. When I say "loosely", I don't necessarily mean I avoided the question entirely, but rather I did not directly answer it. From the essays that my classes and I looked over, that got people accepted all over, don't simply restate the prompt! The reader knows what you are writing about, so convince them with the words that you have limited use of, rather than stating the ones they have given you.
One other lesson I learned is to try to be unique, yet personal. This is perhaps the only part of the application where you can shine through personally if people know you to be humorous, and maybe your letter of recommendation comment on this, drop a joke that would least get a chuckle out of your reader. This is where the risk comes in, you want to have some degree of risk to make it unique. If you just search personal essay on these forums most will be about how their relatives motivated them to serve, or sports and athletics have been a big part of their life, or they want to be a leader and serve on a ship/sub/plane/etc. Admissions will get plenty of these and most of these are basically covered by other parts of your application, like the BGO interview, CFA, Candidates Record.
Allow yourself to shine through without answering both questions chronologically, make a coherent essay where both questions are answered without the reader being able to tell where you shifted from one answer to another. Make them feel the questions are answered without explicitly told so.
Once again, you could ignore what I said, I'm no expert, but I have used a resource, my AP Lit Teacher, who's goal is to get his students accepted into their dream college. Best of luck on your essay!
Once Again, no expert here so take my words with a grain of salt, but I do want to see everyone succeed. I won't detail what I put exactly in my essay but I chose to focus on the second part of the prompt, choosing to focus on an event where I showcase character growth that the Academy would be unaware of when just looking at my application. Here I loosely spelled out through my character growth moment how the Naval Academy would help me achieve the new long-range goals brought forth by this lesson. When I say "loosely", I don't necessarily mean I avoided the question entirely, but rather I did not directly answer it. From the essays that my classes and I looked over, that got people accepted all over, don't simply restate the prompt! The reader knows what you are writing about, so convince them with the words that you have limited use of, rather than stating the ones they have given you.
One other lesson I learned is to try to be unique, yet personal. This is perhaps the only part of the application where you can shine through personally if people know you to be humorous, and maybe your letter of recommendation comment on this, drop a joke that would least get a chuckle out of your reader. This is where the risk comes in, you want to have some degree of risk to make it unique. If you just search personal essay on these forums most will be about how their relatives motivated them to serve, or sports and athletics have been a big part of their life, or they want to be a leader and serve on a ship/sub/plane/etc. Admissions will get plenty of these and most of these are basically covered by other parts of your application, like the BGO interview, CFA, Candidates Record.
Allow yourself to shine through without answering both questions chronologically, make a coherent essay where both questions are answered without the reader being able to tell where you shifted from one answer to another. Make them feel the questions are answered without explicitly told so.
Once again, you could ignore what I said, I'm no expert, but I have used a resource, my AP Lit Teacher, who's goal is to get his students accepted into their dream college. Best of luck on your essay!
Thank you so much for the advice! I really appreciate it!I am no expert personal essays, however, my two cents would be not to spell out your answer to both. As a current applicant of 2024, I also struggled with perfecting my essay, how to best reflect my personal life, motivations, and academic writing style. My class in AP Literature spent about 2 Weeks reading over essays that were unique or different enough that Admissions noticed it enough to accept them. I had this same teacher review my own essay and I had to scrap it many times as I was too focused on directly answering both questions in order, or at least spelling it out for admissions.
Once Again, no expert here so take my words with a grain of salt, but I do want to see everyone succeed. I won't detail what I put exactly in my essay but I chose to focus on the second part of the prompt, choosing to focus on an event where I showcase character growth that the Academy would be unaware of when just looking at my application. Here I loosely spelled out through my character growth moment how the Naval Academy would help me achieve the new long-range goals brought forth by this lesson. When I say "loosely", I don't necessarily mean I avoided the question entirely, but rather I did not directly answer it. From the essays that my classes and I looked over, that got people accepted all over, don't simply restate the prompt! The reader knows what you are writing about, so convince them with the words that you have limited use of, rather than stating the ones they have given you.
One other lesson I learned is to try to be unique, yet personal. This is perhaps the only part of the application where you can shine through personally if people know you to be humorous, and maybe your letter of recommendation comment on this, drop a joke that would least get a chuckle out of your reader. This is where the risk comes in, you want to have some degree of risk to make it unique. If you just search personal essay on these forums most will be about how their relatives motivated them to serve, or sports and athletics have been a big part of their life, or they want to be a leader and serve on a ship/sub/plane/etc. Admissions will get plenty of these and most of these are basically covered by other parts of your application, like the BGO interview, CFA, Candidates Record.
Allow yourself to shine through without answering both questions chronologically, make a coherent essay where both questions are answered without the reader being able to tell where you shifted from one answer to another. Make them feel the questions are answered without explicitly told so.
Once again, you could ignore what I said, I'm no expert, but I have used a resource, my AP Lit Teacher, who's goal is to get his students accepted into their dream college. Best of luck on your essay!