Personal Statement or Pizza?

Especially for those about to graduate college and start applying to grad schools or jobs or both, one can often feel like there are so many pressures, deadlines and expectations pushing in from every angle that it can sometimes become overwhelming and can lead even the most dedicated to seriously consider scrapping everything to just continue at your minimum-wage job making pizzas for the rest of your life.
Well…at least for a few minutes.

One of the worst parts of applying to the various jobs and schools, other than hunting down endlessly disappearing pieces of paper from previous schools and such, is the fact that you are asked time and again to summarize, in 5,000 words or less, all of your significant life accomplishments as well as beliefs, current skills and future goals.

Once this actual ‘summary of your life’ has been written, it is rather easy to recycle and use more than once. But actually writing it in the first place can leave you raking your brain trying desperately to answer the question of "What have I accomplished in my life?" and, just as desperatly, trying to find some significance in the seemingly haphazard collection of life experiences that you have had.

In these stressful times it is really nice to find a comprehensive ‘checklist’ of what to do and include in your application to ensure the previous short-lived fantasy of working forever making pizza does not actually come to pass.

A 2008 blog post by Thomas Robey was very well organized in the way it presented exactly how one should go about writing this dreaded ‘personal statement’.
Although it would be almost impossible for you to avoid the work altogether (*see pizza suggestion above), this post should help immensely in giving you an organized manner of going about writing this crucial short statement.