Writing My Own Personal Statement 4/28/25

I’m currently taking a class about how to help students write their own personal statements, or the common app main essay. I’ve read several books on the topic that I have found very helpful in creating my own method, but I am always interested in finding new and different ways in order to best help my clients.

Part of this course is writing your own personal statement. As a consultant, I’m finding myself flabbergasted! It’s not at all as easy as I thought it was. I am using my older methods blending in the new ones, to see how much I would like to incorporate in my methods. But, I got overwhelmed picking the right topic, so I actually asked ChatGPT what it thought the best topic was! I had already listed a potential of 17 topics (per my current method) and worked through a values guide and several more questionnaires (per my class) prior to losing confidence. 

I whittled down my options from 17 to 3 topics and wrote a few sentences for each before I entered them into the ChatGPT box - again this is what I suggest. The result came back with the suggestion to use option #3, but it needed work. It even included an offer to write the essay! This was tempting, as I was short on time, but I knew I had to do that myself and would schedule it as time allowed. 

I have to note to any current and future clients: please stop there! You must assume your essays will go through an AI checker at every college.

My essay now has two paragraphs for 229/650 words, and I think I’m on to something. I’ve actually been able to link another one of my topics (that didn’t make the final 3) to help me make it more robust - I hope. As of now, I’m a bit stuck as to how to proceed, but I’ll get there. I’m not so sure I’ll use one of my suggestions, which is to trash the first paragraph, but there is content to cut and an opportunity to make a new one that could be eligible to cut. Lol.

Do you think I should post the essay as a blog when I finish??? Let me know! I can’t guarantee that it’ll be my next one as I give students more than a week to write and edit. But it will be ready by my early decision deadline. Now, where is that college list???