On Personal Statements

One tactic to writing good personal statements is to capture the full image of your life, and derive meaning from that. So before writing anything, answer 10 questions about your life, from birth to present. Find these online. Afterwards,

1. When writing my personal statement, I answered all seven prompts in the Common App with max-word responses.
2. For one of the prompts, I even had two decent essays going.
3. One of those essays was on "play", and how I discovered some meaning in life from doing non-productive activities such as basketball, etc. I ended up scrapping this one.
4. My second essay was on my Chinese name. I thought I was clever at the time, but my dad said it might have been too fragmented.
5. For applicants, it's rare you stumble upon an idea that you strongly love and hate at the same time. That is a good signal, and you should stick with that over a mediocre essay.