 Hello my people, my name is Meacham. This video is the supercut of the live stream that we did on Monday. I did a live stream where I explained how to write a personal statement and I did the whole process from start to finish. And so this is basically just the shortens like quick version of that video. Enjoy! Okay, so the whole point today is to show you guys how to write a personal statement for the common app, okay? But this also works for other kinds of personal essays or personal statements of any kind. It's really just a type of essay where you get to speak a little bit about yourself. I recently just did a video about this in the last Thursday video that came out talking about personal statements and what they do and what they're for. So if you haven't checked that out you should probably check that out later but don't leave yet if you're watching live. Like, you know, you can watch that video and get a better idea of what we're trying to do. But we're going to be going through this process live. I want to walk you through the process of writing a personal statement. There's one part that I can't show you which is the part before all of this and that part is thinking, okay? It's really important for you to think about your writing when you're not writing. Like, you should be meditating on it during the day. You should just be like daydreaming a little bit about what you want to write about and what would be kind of like a important thing about yourself that you want to share with people. That's something that I've been doing over the last couple of weeks. Like, I knew I was going to write this and I've been thinking about it quite a bit. Like, I've been pondering and kind of wondering how to write this the best way and so I've been thinking about this a lot and it's helped me, I think, to improve what I'm going to do. So I'm going to start this process actually in a not in a Word document but instead in one note because I want to write down some notes and some ideas. I want to do a little bit of like kind of outlining my work. It's really important that before you start writing something you come up with an outline, sort of a structure for what you want to do. So there's a couple of things I would recommend that you do. For example, the first thing I would say is try to think of a theme. Like, what's the central theme? If you could summarize that in a single word, that would be a really good way to go. I already know what mine's going to be and because I have D and D night tonight I want to get through this in a relatively reasonable amount of time. So this process will be a little bit accelerated but mine is truth. There's my bad handwriting on full display for everyone. So truth is the theme of this essay that I'm going to write. I want to think a little bit about what I'm going to do with this and so I know like with my introduction my intro is going to play on this idea of the truth and that'll make a lot more sense when I start writing it. This idea of the truth and like even with these quotes to kind of make it a little more interesting. So I'm going to play with that idea. Then what I want to do is kind of you know how I found truth. This is kind of related to this intro and how I found truth and how I got out of the truth as it will make sense. Again, this process is only going to make a lot of sense to me and it'll make more sense to you if you watch through and you see how this plays out. So like then I want to get into how that motivates my goals. Okay and this is the thing that's important. I've talked about this and I mentioned it in the last video. You need to think about the future. It's not just enough for you to be like oh yeah okay I want to study this. Like no you need to think about your future beyond graduation. Like what do you see yourself doing here and why is this stuff that has happened in your life so important to this? So I'm going to talk about how that motivates my goals and then I'm going to get into like what those goals are. Okay because that's the stuff that universities really need to see and I also need to get into like my plan. So instead of making this whole personal statement about these first two parts and sort of just ending it there I really want to like try to focus less on my past experiences and more on my future goals and future experiences. I think that's something that's extremely overlooked right now. A lot of people and don't get me wrong. Again a great personal statement can be made by focusing on your struggles and the things that you've overcome in life but it's not necessarily the best approach and I think that the person with a plan is more impressive. I will always stand by that but to be honest like it doesn't really matter which prompt you choose and you can kind of take any story or any idea and make it fit any of these prompts. It just depends on how you frame your introduction and you can start kind of following the prompt and then deviate from it and it's fine and that's why I didn't start with this. I started instead with this stuff like and I started by thinking about this stuff for days like I've been thinking about this thing that I'm going to write for a while because I'm thinking like what can I do you know what do I want to share. So that's basically what's going on here is I've already thought about this stuff but now I'm going to look at these prompts and try to think like what I would you know use this for and so for me I'm pretty sure that I want to build this around prompt number three because it's about questioning a belief or challenging an idea like and that's very much what this story is going to be about questioning a belief. I'm going to be narrating some of my thoughts here but I'm also going to have some moments where I'm just kind of writing so you know again I kind of have the chat here. Hi Diana. Diana Fernandez. Hello it's nice to see you. It's a real treat. You're filling me with inspiration. So yeah okay so I want to start this with a quote and I already plucked that quote because I wanted to be somewhat efficient and so that you could see that I'm prepared today but here's my quote so I need to just tweak this a little bit. So I'm going to open with this quote and this quote is kind of like the thing that defines this concept of the truth. So a couple things I want to talk about for this introduction is like I want to really establish this concept of the truth and I've said it several times obviously here but I'm basing it off of this quote right that I mentioned from where it comes from and I want to kind of give the reader a little bit of a tease like I don't want to just straight up say what this truth is or like any like I'm trying to kind of bury that a little bit and wait for like the next paragraph to sort of explain this a little more. So again even kind of going back to like this how I found truth you know that being my like next point that I want to get into I'm going to have to explain a little bit more about this the truth but I would I would like to hope at this point that whoever's reading this is like okay a little more curious about this like what is the truth like what does that mean why is he putting in quotes and I'm playing with that idea of the quotes around the word here to sort of say that like one day I dare to take those quotes off like I dared to sort of like question that this is the truth and so that changed my life and so then there's also this aspect of what prompted your thinking what was the outcome so those are parts of the prompt that I do have to get to and I'm gonna start working on those in the next paragraph here. I could make this like 600 I could do thousands of words on what it was like to grow up as a Jehovah's Witness and what it was like to live through like some of the things I live through and I've already written that stuff that's out on the internet somewhere if you want to go search for it but that's not what this is for like I'm trying to focus on my university application here I gotta keep that in mind like that's what this is for so I'm showing somebody you know my thought process and how I got to this point but I also need to bring that point home so I'm gonna go into that now in this third paragraph so yeah you see I'm trying to kind of transition out of my own like personal experience here and kind of get to the bigger picture of like why I care about this now and why I want to do something about this like I see this as sort of a bigger problem that I think is important to solve and I think I've established like my motivations and how I see a bigger problem so now I want to get to this like kind of final part of this which is um where I want to change that like this problem that I've identified here um so okay I'm at 660 I need to trim down a little bit more um another thing I'm trying to do that I would really recommend for a lot of people and I am going to make another video soon about like writing tips that you can use but one thing I'm trying to do is vary the length of my sentences a lot like I did like a two word sentence to start this paragraph to kind of hit it with some impact and then I went into some like a longer idea and then again a short fragment longer idea short fragments you know and so by doing that I'm kind of keeping the pace interesting and trying to like you know keep the essay from feeling like just repetitive if every sentence is the same length and the same tone it kind of just gets boring after a while I think I can shorten this um this is a little rambly be myself I could just say that and then this is another thing like you want to look for where you can trim words where you can like use less words to say the same ideas because that will give your sentences a lot more impact if you have a really long sentence with like repetitive ideas then you're actually diluting the message and you're making it weaker so I'm trying to kind of like look for ways where maybe I sort of repeated myself or like said something twice in the same sentence or maybe where I've chosen to use like a few words where I could use one oh yeah we're down here 653 three words have to go you can almost always take out be able to and there we go this is going to go up on prepwithscore.com I'm going to leave this like as an article there that you can find out you can go to the site I'll show you real quick where you'll be able to see it if you go to the website I'm going to have the like down at the bottom of the site there's this section where we have like articles that we post where I haven't updated in a while to be honest I got somebody helping me with those two but we're going to put a blog post up that is about this with a link to this video as well so that is all for us today guys thank you very much for stopping by the channel I hope you have a wonderful time and I'll see you next week