This one's got to be a two parter.
There's just too much bad information out there when it comes to how to write
these personal statements.
So it's going to take a while to kind of break this down.
Welcome everyone again.
This is the pop out with your host Albert Shin.
And today I want to start a two parter on personal statements.
Personal statements have a lot of confusing information
surrounding it, at least in the public.
And I think people who claim to know what they're doing or what they're talking
about when they're talking about personal statements have no idea what they're
really talking about. OK, that's just my personal opinion.
Don't try to come at me for it.
OK, so in my opinion, and I think, you know, the people who are in the
emission side, like the people who are actually reviewing these personal
statements will probably more or less agree.
The reason that there are these personal statements is basically twofold.
One, it's to provide information that the reader cannot find anywhere else
in your application.
All right.
So in other words, it's meant to add new information or at least add to the
details of some critical information in your application that just isn't there
isn't like a room for it.
Right.
And I'll come back to exactly what that means.
And second of all, its purpose should be to put the entire application into the
proper context so that it feels like one holistic person that is applying to the
university.
Right.
Now, these two things go hand in hand, and I'm going to explain exactly how
that is.
But the key here is this.
The goal of a personal statement is not to tell us off story, but to give you
a story. The goal of a personal statement is not to try to brag about how awesome
you are.
OK, the goal of a personal statement isn't even necessarily to sell yourself.
Right. If you're a salesperson or if you're applying for a job.
It's not quite you trying to pump yourself up.
That is not the point of a personal statement.
The point of a personal statement is to make you feel like a real person in a
way that makes sense with the rest of the application.
And to do that, you need to kind of fill in the gaps.
OK, so in order for me to explain this kind of clearly, we need to backtrack a
little bit and think about what else is on your application.
Right. So when you're applying to colleges, there's a bunch of information
that you put down. Right.
They're going to get your transcripts, they'll get your GPAs, the kind of
classes you took, the kind of things that you did in terms of extracurricular
activities or if you had like work experience or yada yada yada yada.
Right. Like the things you could list on, let's say like a resume.
Right. Those are things they're going to have access to.
If you had leadership positions, if you won a bunch of awards, there's a place
for you to list all of that stuff.
OK, so then why ask for a personal statement?
Well, think about it.
If you are the one trying to review applicants and you're looking at a list
of accomplishments, there's a lot of information that is missing.
Right. What exactly is missing in the application?
Well, let's think about this.
One, there's not a clear sense.
I mean, they could try to guess and assume, but, you know, there's not a clear sense
of where your strengths and interests are based strictly on your grades and your
extracurricular activities.
And this is especially true for students who are extremely well rounded and they do
everything well. Right.
Then it's not quite clear what particular thing makes you the kind of person that
you are. Right.
What particularly moves you, what drives you, what excites you.
There's not a sense of, you know, what all of this stuff that you're doing has to do
with you specifically and your personal goals in college and beyond.
Right.
Right. Again, they could do a lot of guessing, like I'm applying for this major
and you express interest in X, Y and Z, but they're not going to have a good sense
of who you are as a person just by looking at a list of accomplishments, things that
you've done. What they need is for you to tell them a story about how all of these
things kind of tie together.
Right. So this is the second part of it, right, where I said, you know, we're
trying to go ahead and present, you know, yourself as a complete person.
Right. Where all of the stuff that you've done is put into context to explain the
kind of person that you are.
Right. But here's the key.
Right. In order for you to do that and do it well, in order for you to explain
everything else that is in your application and to explain everything in there well,
what you do need to do is to fill in the gaps.
You need to fill in the gaps in your application.
And by gaps, what I mean is fill in the missing information that is not there that
there's no space for in the other parts of your application.
You need to make sure that information gets in there.
Right. What kind of information that is, it honestly, with the exception of a few
things, which I'll mention, it honestly doesn't matter as long as it's authentic.
And this is the key.
It has to be true to you, true to who you are at your core.
OK, so let me give you some examples to kind of get us started.
Right. Suppose you took a bunch of honors classes, right.
And a lot of range of subjects.
And then you, you know, took a foreign language and then you did a lot of
volunteering activity in, let's say, a hospital.
And then you did some club activities at school.
OK, some social clubs or something like that.
OK. All right.
You're applying for college.
They want to know what your area of interest is.
What are you going to have to do?
You're going to have to explain exactly what it is that you want to pursue, what
topics you really want to focus in on, because part of college is you're going to
focus in on some narrower set of academic, you know, curiosities.
Right.
So, you know, if you want to go into, let's say the pre-med route, you want to be a
doctor at some point or, you know, and is connected to your experience at
volunteering at this hospital.
Right.
That's information they actually don't have.
They know that based on what you said your interests were, they might know that
you're interested in going into medical school at some point.
And they know that you did some volunteering activity at a hospital.
What they don't know is how those things are related to one another.
Right.
What they don't know is, for instance, that there was a specific incident that
happened while you were volunteering and it was particularly eye opening for you.
And it really changed the course, changed the course of your interest.
Right.
Before you had no interest in being a doctor, but after that experience, you
realize yada yada, you're, you know, that there's some kind of interest in that you
have in it and you want it to change lives in such and such a way.
Right.
They don't have that information.
They need that information for it to make sense for all these dots to be connected.
Some applications, it's a little bit easier to kind of make assumptions.
Right.
So if you're like heavy, like if your activities are heavy in one direction,
right, it's clear that that's your area of interest.
Right.
But one of the things that they don't know is why you're actually interested in
those things, what is driving you to go ahead and pursue that particular thing,
whether it's medicine, whether it's medicine, whether it's medicine, whether
it's business, right.
Where does that interest come from?
Right.
And there's no right answer to this.
The only right answer is the honest one.
It's the answer of you and what led you to come to this place where you have this
interest or a specific skill set or specific set of experiences that point
you into that direction.
Right.
It could go all the way back to childhood, right.
It could be something from early childhood, something about, you know,
experience with parents or caregivers.
It could have to do with some experience you had from some sort of
activity you did at school.
It could involve some other personal experience that you encountered.
It could be something that you had to deal with, with regards to like a
family member, right.
Like for instance, a family member dealing with an health issue, maybe that
sparked an interest in something or another, or maybe something that your
friend went through sparked interest in whatever it is that you're now pursuing.
Right.
The important thing is there has to be some sort of story because people are not
robots.
People are not the kind of beings that just go beep, beep, beep, beep.
This is the way to go because this is what the algorithm told me to do with my
life.
Right.
That's not the way that people work.
People are gain interest in something, are passionate about something because
something sparked within them and that's something that sparked within them.
It's not innate and you're not born with it.
Something in your experience, right.
You might have had some tendencies, but there was some experience that lit a
fire in you that made you want to accomplish X, Y, and Z.
Right.
And what they're wanting to know in your personal statement is what exactly is
that?
That story about you, what makes you tick, what drives you, what drives you,
what makes you who you are.
That's what they're wanting to see.
It makes the rest of the application make sense.
Right.
For instance, suppose that somebody was applying, took a bunch of science
classes, you know, all the honors classes were only in science classes, didn't
really do much in English, took just regular courses in English.
And then they applied to college, but when they applied to college, they did
not apply for a science major, they applied as an English major.
And, you know, the applicant is going to be looking at this application, this
application makes absolutely no sense.
If you're so interested in English that you want to pursue it in college, why
on earth did you take a bunch of science classes when you're in high school?
Why did you focus on those areas and not focus on, you know, English?
Well, there might be a story behind it.
It might, it might seem confusing at first, but, you know, it's
like, there might be a story that makes absolute sense.
Right.
Let me give you an example.
Right.
It could be that your interest in English stems from, you know, your passion for
reading, but unfortunately, because of, let's say you suffered from dyslexia,
or maybe you are, you know, you immigrated to the United States when you
were, I don't know, like eight years old.
And so English is not your primary language and, you know, you tried and
tried to learn, but you weren't good enough to get into those honors classes.
But, you know, you'd still had that passion for English literature, let's say.
And so that's what your real passion is.
You just happen to be really, really good in the sciences.
Right.
But that's not where your passion lies.
Like that information would be super helpful because now it doesn't seem
like you're up to something weird or you're not an applicant that doesn't
make any sense, right?
You're not a confusing applicant.
You're an applicant that sounds like a real person with real experience and the
things that you picked actually make sense.
Okay.
Now, this is also true for, you know, aspects of your resume, right?
The other parts of your application, where the applicant might look at it and be
like, this doesn't quite make a lot of sense, or there's a sudden shift or a
change, and I'm not sure what happened here, right?
And a good example of this, and this happens to some students, right?
Where they were doing great in terms of their grades.
They're getting like, you know, B's and A's only.
And then all of a sudden, one particular semester, their grades take a nosedive.
Right.
Maybe it's for a full year, right?
Or maybe a year of their high school career is just gone, right?
Like they just disappeared for a year, at least on the resume, it looks like.
Right.
Like that doesn't make any sense.
That's not like the standard trajectory of a high school student's career.
So then the, you know, the applicant, the, you know, admission committee is
going to look at that and be like, okay, this doesn't make any sense.
Can you give me some information to help me out?
And this is what the personal statement is for.
This is where you can explain exactly what happened.
Right.
So it could be, for instance, that you were grieving a terrible personal loss,
or your family was going through some family, you know, trauma or tragedy.
All right.
Or you were going through your own personal health issues.
Okay.
The goal here is not to tell a sob story or to make excuses for yourself.
That's not what this is.
What this is, is you giving all of the relevant information so that the
admission committee can make sense of the applicant and so the admission
committee can look and say, I understand this person that's applying.
All right.
The grades, the SAT scores, all these metrics are merely data points.
And those data points don't actually make sense until you put it all together.
Right.
Until you put it all together.
So if your grades dip one particular semester, but you show outstanding
grades and the rest of them, if you could explain what factors contributed
to that one semester, that would be extremely helpful because now the
admission committee knows, hey, it's not that they're not capable of
having gotten great grades.
They were just going through some stuff that made it particularly difficult
this particular semester, but now they got a handle on it and look at
how well they're thriving.
Right.
That's the information that they need.
Okay.
Another good example that I found with students was, you know, if they had
to work, for instance, because their family was going through financial
struggle, it's expected that the grades are going to take a hit.
Right.
It is hard.
If you are a high school student and you're, you know, during the school
year, you have a part-time job or you're helping out your parents at their store,
you know, 20 hours a week because they need the help, because you're in
financial turmoil, right.
If you had to do all that and it's not something glamorous that you could put
on your resume, that information would be still be super duper helpful
to have in there somewhere.
Why is that?
Well, for one, there could be a lot of life experiences that you bring to the
table from those, from the experience you had, but two, it could do a lot
of explaining of, for instance, why you didn't take all honors classes, right?
Well, honors classes tend to take up more energy and more time.
And more, right.
It takes up more, it takes more out of you.
More that you cannot give if you're too busy caring for your family.
Right.
I've met students who had to take care of, for instance, the elderly
in their family, right.
There was the, both parents were working and you know, their grandmother or
grandfather was living with them and they had no way to care for themselves.
And so, you know, the students would go to school, come back from school and
then do their part in caring for their grandparents.
Right.
It's not that they're not capable of doing the academic work.
They're not capable, they're prepared.
They're able to hold their, hold their own.
Right.
But the reason that they didn't do a bunch of extracurricular activities, for
instance, is that they were too busy doing something else, right.
Something very much valuable and worthwhile, at least I think.
Right.
In other words, personal statements, okay, is not your chance to just
blab about all how wonderful you are and how accomplished you are.
The personal statement is an opportunity for you to explain just who you are in
ways that you just can't show in other parts of your application, because the
other parts of your application, honestly, just does not give you the room for it.
Even if you do, like if you, even if you can list some of the activities that
you've done in high school, you know, the way that it is meaningful for you or
how it impacted you, that's not going to be in any other place in your application.
It's going to be in the personal statement.
Right.
Which means when you are thinking about what am I going to write about in my
personal statement, I want you to follow a list of questions that you make sure
you answer along the way, right?
In other words, I want you to have a laser focus on the actual
purpose of a personal statement.
Okay.
There's going to be a lot of talk and we're going to get into this right
about the topics you pick.
Okay.
There's going to be a lot of talk about like, you shouldn't pick this topic.
You shouldn't pick that topic.
Okay.
I think those are all supposed to be rule of thumbs.
I think they are not really at the core of what you should be doing with
regards to personal statements.
But I think it's just like a kind of shorthand that people have thrown out there.
I want us to get away from that.
And there's going to be a reason for it is that your story matters.
Whatever aspect of you that actually matters to you, that's what should be
coming out in the personal statement.
And the reason for it is that the personal statement, like I said, is
designed to give you a chance to explain who you really are.
Okay.
So here's some questions for you to kind of answer.
Here's some questions for you to kind of think about and ponder before we talk in
some detail about exactly what to write and how to write it.
Okay.
One, what information about my life is missing in the other parts of the
application?
Okay.
What aspects of my life are missing?
Okay.
This could be work.
This could be, you know, personal matters.
This could be relationships.
This could be, you know, X, Y, Z, just whatever life experience, because, you
know, let's be honest, school is school, but there's a lot of things that happen
outside of school or within school that has nothing to do with grades and all of
that.
Right.
So that's one thing.
Right.
And again, I don't want you to limit yourself here.
All of your life matters.
Right.
So this could be dealing with friendships.
This could be dealing with family.
This could be dealing with, you know, your own personal journeys, health,
whatever else it might be.
Okay.
So what is missing in the rest of the application that you haven't talked
about that, you know, is a part of who you are.
Right.
Okay.
Secondly, does my application actually make sense?
In other words, is everything on my application a cohesive picture of the
kind of person that I really am or are there holes in this story?
Are there gaps in the story?
Is there something about the picture that's being painted that is not an
accurate picture of who I am?
Right.
So, for instance, this includes taking a significant amount of time off or a
sudden change in grade or a sudden change in activity or participation level.
Right.
Any of these things could qualify.
Right.
But what you want to think about when you're thinking about what to include in
your personal statement, you need to ask yourself, like, is there something
about the personal statement that doesn't make sense if you just read it
off on a piece of paper as a list of things that you've done?
Okay.
If there's some things that just don't make a lot of sense, whether it's the
type of activities you're participating in or whatever else, like that needs to
be explained.
These are two things.
So these two first two questions are things that absolutely have to be in
your personal statement.
Okay.
Absolutely have to be in your personal statement.
I'm going to stress, I'm going to stress, okay, those of you who are going through
a lot of hardships, those of you going through a lot of hardships, whether it's
financial difficulty, whether it's, you know, physical or mental health issues,
whether it's like various like learning disabilities, whether it's right,
whatever it is you're struggling through.
And I know students have all kinds of stories that I've talked to a lot of
students and, you know, they've I've heard the range, right?
You know, domestic abuse, alcoholism and gambling addiction in the family, right?
Like there's a whole bunch of stuff that you could be going through.
Okay.
All right.
I'm talking specifically to you.
Okay.
Do not be ashamed of your life experiences.
Okay.
Be ready to put it all out there on the personal statement.
And I'm saying this to you specifically for a reason.
Okay.
You have a lot of potential, but life has dealt you a really bad hand.
And so your potential hasn't been reached or isn't showing in your application.
Okay.
If you were able to meet the basic minimum requirements to apply to college,
then you are worthy of actually writing out all the things that have hindered you
from reaching your full potential.
Okay.
This is not you writing a sob story.
This is not you making excuses for yourself.
This is not a boo-hoo, oh, woe is me, please give me a handout story.
That's not at all what this is.
Okay.
What this is, is a chance for the admission committee to actually see all of your accomplishments.
Okay.
Just because there's no specific award for it doesn't mean that your experiences are
not valuable in the academic setting.
Okay.
Does not mean that.
And it does not mean that your accomplishments are actually reflective of your real potential.
Okay.
Colleges know that life gets in the way of you being able to be your best self.
The question is, can you show that that potential is really there by showing them
that you are still able to do quite a bit with all of the bad things that life has dealt you?
Okay.
So do not make excuses for yourself.
Do not hold your head down in shame.
Do not be worried that you are trying to elicit sympathy or anything like that.
That is not what this is.
This is nothing more than what everyone else is doing on their personal statement, which
is providing information that the, you know, mission committee does not have and two,
putting your accomplishments into the right context.
Right.
There's a difference between somebody keeping up straight A's when they had nothing else
to do in their free time.
They had everything that they needed provided for versus somebody who's maintained straight
A's while also, you know, holding down a 30, 20, 30 hour week job because they had to support
their family financially.
Okay.
There's a big difference between the two.
One shows even greater potential because they just weren't given the opportunities to let
that potential fly.
Okay.
And this is what the mission committee wants to know.
They're not looking to give handouts.
Okay.
So in other words, you have to work for it.
You still have to accomplish something to show them that you have the potential, but
you do need to also share all the things happening in your life that impact how to understand
the accomplishments that you have, that you have made.
Okay.
Sound good.
Okay.
Last words.
Last words before we move on to part two.
Okay.
When you write, when you write in your personal statement, okay, you need to be yourself.
This is a personal statement.
This is not some sort of elaborate, revised, you know, edited, you know, what do people
call it?
Like, this is not a way to present yourself as smarter or more intellectual than you really
are.
That's not really the goal.
Now, should you write the way that you text your friends?
No, definitely not.
It's still a professional document, right?
So you should treat it seriously as such.
Should you not have people edit it?
No, you should have it edited by people who know what they're doing.
You should have people look at it to make sure that you're not saying things that you,
you know, make you may look poorly on you, right?
Or be chock full of, you know, writing errors.
Right.
Okay.
What I mean is that authenticity is what captures the audience.
It needs to feel like a real person speaking to the admission committee.
That's what it needs to feel like.
Okay.
Essays that are overly polished, right, or clearly is trying to present yourself as someone
that itself is going to raise red flags because then it starts looking like you are presenting
some sort of facade.
Now, high school students tell me, no, no, no, but I could go ahead and fake it.
I can make it sound like it's real.
Right. Okay. Like they tell me all these things, but I've been, I've been, you know, I'm a
philosophy instructor.
Right.
So I grade a lot of papers like you can tell immediately.
Right.
When you have developed the kind of writing and reading skills at the, you know, highest
of levels, which a lot of these people in the admission committees will have, right,
they have graduate degrees, for instance, they're going to know when something comes
off as very unauthentic, right, inauthentic.
So you want to make sure that you are really being authentic.
Okay.
That you are really being authentic, okay.
That you are presenting your true self.
Okay. Again, you should still have somebody edit, right, because your true self might
not be necessarily the best true self that you have.
Okay. But your goal here is to sound like a real person.
Okay. It's going to be a different style of writing.
We'll talk a lot more about this, but it's a different way of writing that's going to
require you, okay, to not write like you do for an academic paper, like you do for like
a, you know, midterm essay at school.
That's not how you should be writing.
You should be writing more like you're sharing a story with a friend.
Okay. And it will hit a chord, no matter what the story, it will hit a chord with the
reader if you're being authentic.
Once you stop being authentic, that's when the audience will start to bore.
That's when they'll start to snooze and stop paying attention.
Okay. It's not about humor.
It's not about being clever.
Okay. If you are a funny person, if you are clever, if that's a part of your DNA, that's
just kind of who you are, then great, include that.
But if that's not who you are, don't put that in there.
Okay. Be yourself.
Okay.
What that means is that you will need to do a lot, a lot of self reflection.
Okay. So one thing that will really help, I think, for students to kind of prepare to
write a personal statement when they're writing an essay like this and talking about
themselves in the most authentic way in order for you to be authentic, you need to actually
know yourself.
You're going to have to start doing some reflections.
Okay. So a couple of simple exercises that are helpful to get you started.
One is if you don't do it already, I mean, I don't know how popular this is, but I think
some people do it now in the form of like blogging or vlogging.
But in written form, I, when I was a young kid, you know, used to have a diary where
I would write out my feelings and experiences and so on.
Right. That would be a good place to start.
If you haven't done that before, it's a different kind of writing.
It'll feel a lot different than the kind of writing you do for school.
But there's another exercise that I found to be really helpful for me when I wrote
personal statements, both for applying to colleges, but also applying to graduate schools.
Right. And here's the exercise.
Right. I want you to draw a timeline of your life up to this point.
Okay. And I want you to pinpoint memories that have stuck with you.
That are very vivid. Right. These are memories that, you know, you just, you know, you'll
never forget because there's something about the experience that really matter to you.
Right. And I don't want you to censor yourself here.
I don't want you to censor yourself and then tell yourself like, oh, like doesn't sound
like all that important. Okay.
This is one of the things that I struggle with with students.
Right. It's like, look, when you're writing these personal statements, you got to take
all the filters off. Okay.
You can't edit yourself.
You can't edit yourself while you're writing these papers.
Right. So in this exercise, what I want you to do is I want you to be honest with yourself
and say like, hey, these are some memories that really stuck with me.
Okay. These are some memories that really stuck with me.
Let me give you an example of one that of my own that might sound completely like whatever,
but it has often stuck with me.
I had a recurring dream.
I had a recurring dream where I don't know if you know the movie E.T.
This is from my childhood.
Right. E.T.
The movie where there's this alien thing and, you know, Elliot's the main character has
this alien on a basket on his on his bike and he's riding away from all these like people
who are trying to chase after them.
And then the bike starts to fly.
Right. I had a recurring dream, a nightmare, to be honest, when I was a kid where that
was happening to me in the apartment complex that I was living in, except that the bike
would start to go up a little bit.
I mean, I have an alien with me, but the bike would start to go up a little bit.
I was running away from people.
I don't even know why in the dream, but I was flying a little bit, maybe like a foot
off the ground.
And then all of a sudden it would come crashing back down.
And then whoever was chasing me, the group of people chasing me would be able to capture
me.
And that's when I woke up from the dream.
Okay.
That was a nightmare.
Okay.
But it's something that I still remember to this day because it was a recurring nightmare,
but clearly it had an impact on me.
There wouldn't be a reason for me to remember it if it didn't have that kind of impact on
me.
Okay.
So whatever that is, I want you to, on your timeline, mark all of those moments.
I want you to mark all of those moments.
Okay.
There will probably be quite a few key memories that really were impactful for you.
If you haven't watched the movie Inside Out, especially Inside Out 2, right, that would
be a good set of movies to watch because I think this is going to be really helpful for
kind of opening up your mind to reflecting on these experiences and what they actually
mean for you.
And once you have laid out all of these experiences, I want you to start asking yourself,
right, how these, how did these experiences that are so vivid to me, right, how has that
actually impacted me?
Right.
Now you might need help from friends to kind of point some connections out here, right,
but there's usually an explanation if you are interested in, let's say, chemistry.
It could be the subject itself, but oftentimes there's something else that has contributed
to your having a passion for that thing.
Okay.
If you're interested in history, there might be a reason that you're interested in history.
If you're interested in, I don't know, like I'm trying to think, oh, like I was interested
in political science and game theory and philosophy, right.
You know, when I think about my interest in philosophy, right, yeah, the subject interested
me, but the question is this, why did it interest me so much?
And then I have this vivid memory of my having these arguments with my dad over theology,
over the existence of God, over religion, over politics, over social issues, and over big concepts,
ideas about truth, right.
I would have these discussions with my dad.
I remember my brother was bored of them.
My mom thought it was too much conflict in the house and they didn't like the back and
she didn't like the back and forth, right.
But my dad and I really got into it and we would sometimes return to screaming matches.
But I have these vivid memories and then I was thinking about it, where did my interest
actually come from?
It probably started at a fairly early age.
Something about this topic is interesting to me, maybe because it was interesting to
me before.
And on top of that, I had this space to explore that curiosity with somebody.
And so that interest kind of stuck with me, right.
That's something for me, right, is very, very significant.
For you, it's going to be something else, okay.
What matters here isn't the actual event.
What matters here isn't the actual thing that, you know, is meaningful for you.
What matters is that it's meaningful for you.
And that's where you're going to find authenticity.
It needs to matter to you, okay.
So I'll talk more about exactly how to translate that into a personal state.
But for now, what you need to be able to do is to actually talk honestly about yourself
to yourself.
You need to speak honestly about yourself to yourself.
This is the good, the bad, the ugly.
You need to be able to talk about it all because you're not going to be able to present
the best parts of you without also acknowledging the worst parts of you.
Right.
So good or bad memory doesn't matter.
Is it a big major trauma or something that people would all be in shock and all over?
It doesn't matter.
What matters is only it's only one thing that matters.
What matters is that it's meaningful for you.
And one way to kind of detect that this is just one tool, it's not a guarantee, but as
one tool, we're figuring out what actually matters to you is that the memories that
linger, that never go away, the memories that you always seem to come back to, are going
to come back to often have left an imprint in you for a reason.
It has left a mark in you because it was something that actually mattered to you, whether it
was good, whether it was bad, whether it was ugly.
Right.
An embarrassing moment, something you did that you're ashamed of, something that you're
excited about and super joyful for, something that someone did to you or that you did to
somebody else, like whatever it is.
If it matters to you, I want you to mark it down, make a note of it, and let's start unpacking
that.
And that's where we're going to find the gem in your personal statement.
Until next time.