Admission essays: A few things you should avoid when you are writing a personal statement for university admissions

Writing a personal statement for the university of your dreams can be an extremely difficult task because it is one of the final deciding factors for the university admissions board.

The purpose of the admissions essay is to give the candidate the chance to tell the university why they deserve a spot. Because universities get thousands of applications each year, they need a way to filter out the deserving candidates who actually put time and effort into their personal statements, from those who did not.

If you are having a difficult time writing your personal statement, you can acquire help from websites like https://myadmissionsessay.com/. When people write essays and personal statements for their top choices of universities, they tend to make some common mistakes that you should avoid:

• Repeating what the university already knows. You will give your university a bunch of documents that will consist of information like where you study, what GPA you have, and more. This is not the kind of thing you want to restate in the personal statement, because in this way you are wasting the limited word count you have.

• Using a generic personal statement. The admissions boards at universities can tell when you are using a template and are simply changing the name of what university you are applying to. If you really want to secure a place in a specific university you need to write a unique personal statement that will convey how much you deserve the spot which is something a generic personal statement will fail to do.

• Using a clichéd introduction. The introduction is where you have the chance to hook the reader to read the rest of the essay. Using overused techniques such as starting with a question or quote is not effective and will simply bore the reader.

• Not using examples. A common mistake that is often pointed out is that students don’t tend to use examples when they are talking about a key skill or competency they have. Feel free to use real-life examples of what you have actually done that will convey to the reader that you actually are capable of something instead of listing all the strengths you have. The key to writing an effective essay is to support each strength and achievement with an example.

• Making grammar and spelling mistakes. It is normal to make mistakes but it gives off a very bad impression when you send the essay without fixing them. This is why we advise our students to proofread the essay as many times as they can till because each time you will find a small mistake that you missed out on before.

Not having it read by other people. It will be very helpful for you to have someone else look at your personal statement instead of just yourself. Your friends and family can help you point out things that you can remove or improve on that you didn’t think about.