I presented this to the student interns and wrote this blog post to share some of the many lessons I learned. It is my intent as well as to share my presentation and style to practitioners who present on this kind of material. I don't want to hoard knowledge. It is important to know that there is no magic formula or “correct answer” when it comes to writing personal statements; however, this is just some lessons I learned along the way to begin to develop my voice as a writer. It is valuable to learn from many sources and begin to find your voice. Uiha...e hele kakou!
The best way of learning how to write personal statements is to write a personal statement
Two days before the presentation, I sent an email to the attendees to fill out a pre-evaluation form. This was a mock scholarship “personal statement” activity from a real scholarship. There were 10 required questions with a character limit of 200 characters to answer.