 Hello my people, my name is Meacham and today we're going to talk about an important part of your application process if you're going to the United States, your personal statement. Also I'm really excited to announce the first ever live stream on this channel. I'm going to be making a personal statement about myself in real time for you. June 21st at 6.30pm Peruvian Standard Time, that's 7.30 Eastern if you live in the United States and it's like 4.30 in the morning for my Pakistan peeps and like 5, 6.30 in the morning for people in India. You'll be able to watch it here after it's over so don't worry you're not gonna miss a thing. We're also gonna be streaming it to our Facebook page, there's a link in the description in this video so if you want to check it out again it's Monday June 21st 6.30 PM Peruvian Time. Alright so let's talk about what this personal statement is about anyway so you know what I'm gonna be doing on Monday. When you decide to go to the United States to study you're going to need to use the Common App application. Now the Common App is essentially a central portal for almost all of the universities in the United States. You can submit your information once and it will be sent to all of the universities that you want to apply to. In addition to personal information one of the things that the Common App asks you to do is to write an essay of up to 650 words. Common App gives you six different prompts to choose from and the option of a seventh which is simply to make your own prompt. Regardless of which prompt you choose there's a certain way to go about this personal statement. We want to show you how to write a personal statement that'll make the admission officers want to cry but not not in the bad way like crying the good way like you know in the way of like oh my god I've never seen such a beautiful essay before. It's amazing. I don't cry so if I could I would but I can't so I don't. So before we can talk about how to write this personal statement we need to talk a little bit about what it's for. Yeah no kidding. The personal statement is essentially your first impression to most universities. Every university that you apply to through the Common App is going to see this personal statement and so that means that it has to be really good. I like this today. It's an opportunity for you to share a little bit about yourself what makes you you and to talk about your goals and what you want to do in the future. Now a lot of people want to talk about the difficulties they've overcome or the struggles that they face and while that can certainly be an excellent option for a personal statement there's something you should know. Your struggles are not unique. Plenty of young people deal with things like depression, anxiety, eating disorders, having no friends, peer pressure, parent pressure. All of these things are very common. While you might feel like you're the only one who's experienced it the truth is most people have. So don't think that just by talking about some of your difficulties in life you're going to make an incredible impression. Instead what we would encourage people to do is to focus a little more on the future. While your past experiences are important to talk about because they have shaped who you are today what universities want to know is what are you going to be like in the future. The thing to understand about universities in the United States is that they want to know that you're going to be successful. They want you to be a good statistic. What is a good statistic? A good statistic is a student that graduates in four years goes on to get a great job makes a bunch of money and maybe just maybe put some of that money back into their alma mater in the form of donation. Basically if every university looked at your application said ooh we could have a library named after this person someday you're going to get in. Think back to all those college ranking statistics that we talked about in one of my early videos. By the way I often tell you guys about earlier videos not because I'm just trying to like pimp out my channel for more views but honestly because I see that a lot of the people coming to this channel are here for the first time and since there's a lot of new viewers I want you guys to know what else we do on the score channel and I also want to encourage you to join the road to one billion subscribers and subscribe to the channel so that you can go from being a blue line to a purple line. You're much more than a purple line. So how do we show universities that you are going to be a good statistic? If the only thing you tell people in your personal statement is I'm really sure that I want to study sociology that's why I'm studying sociology. You're not going to impress people as much as say the student who says I want to study sociology because I want to better understand the problems in my society and later I want to start an NGO that solves those problems by directly acting on people's lives. See one of those people knows what they want to study, another person knows what they want to do, one person knows what they want to learn, another knows what they want to accomplish. You need to show admissions officers that you know where you want to be not just in a couple of years, not just on graduation day but years after that and that can be really difficult when you honestly don't know exactly what you want to do or where you're going to end up but that's okay. You don't necessarily have to have all the answers now but the key is that you have a vision and you can share that vision in an engaging and captivating way. So let's talk about how to write this personal statement in a way that will accomplish that. First the first paragraph is super important. You need to start with a hook. Now a good hook is something that gets the reader engaged. You could drop a shocking statistic perhaps about your home country or your environment. You could leave the reader wondering more about a topic by asking a thought-provoking question. You could present something that's radical and unexpected, a new definition of a term for example. The key is to give the reader something they've never seen before or at the very least give them something they've seen before in a way that is new. You have to remember that these admission officers, bless their hearts, these poor people have to read dozens hundreds of these essays. The truth is they don't read all of them all the way through. Not all of them are that good and if they can't even get through the first paragraph of yours good luck getting admitted. Recently a Common App essay went viral with lots of people talking about how creative it was and how it managed to take a deep topic and at the same time present this person in a way that showed that they were ready for the future. The hook for this essay was to use a clever twist on the singular and plural of the word parent. Obviously losing a parent is a traumatic experience which will be difficult for anyone to overcome and it's certainly the type of experience that you could share in a personal statement. What made this essay stand out was the unique way it played with the language. In doing that it got the reader to think a little bit more about the topic and actually be interested in something that happened to somebody else. So hook the reader in with something engaging, something different, something unique. From there try to develop the topic a little bit in that first paragraph. Let them know what we're gonna be learning a little bit more about. Regardless of your topic make sure that by the end of that first paragraph the reader wants to continue. A great way to do this is literally to write that first paragraph and show it to other people. Ask your teachers, ask your peers, ask your family. Would you keep reading this? Now your next couple of paragraphs should detail that story. Go back a little bit in time. Tell me about the story or the experience that you've had and then in the next paragraph explain how you learned something from it and how that something has led you to decide what you want to study. The idea is to start at the present day, go back into the past to explain how we got to the present and then think forward to the future. So those last couple of paragraphs should focus on why you're sure that this area of study is right for you and what you want to do with it after you graduate. Cannot stress this enough. The person with a plan is far more impressive than the person who just wants to get into the university. Writing a long personal statement can be difficult and especially if you're thinking about the word count, that can make it really hard to get your ideas out in the open. Remember that your first draft is probably going to suck and that's okay. We would encourage you to write a lot more than 650 words. Write thousands if you want because from there it becomes a lot easier to pare down the words and get them down to 650. Maybe out of your 2,000 words only half of them are good. Great. That's still more than 650. If all you do is write 450 words and say, I don't have any more ideas, then what you're telling me is that you don't have a lot to say about yourself and if you don't have a lot to say about yourself, what makes you think that somebody abroad is going to accept you into a university? I know this sounds harsh but you have to remember that you're not special. It's your job to make yourself seem like such a valuable contributor to that university that the admissions officer would be a fool not to bring you in. Now writing these essays can be tricky and something that we do here at SCORE is help people come up with good ideas and give them recommendations on how to structure their essays better. So if it's your first time checking out the SCORE channel, welcome. I hope you subscribe. I hope you stick around because we've got a lot more useful content coming up for you. We're here to help if you need us, prepwhiskor.com. Check us out on Instagram at prepwhiskor. We're getting hype for the next season of college admissions. I can't wait. Let's go. I'll see you next week.