ESSAY ABOUT YOURSELF

Table of Contents

• The Meaning of The Essay About Yourself
• The Devil is in The Details
• Making a List and Checking it Twice
• Telling Your Story with Reflections Related to The Prompt
• Introducing Yourself in The First Paragraph – Some Examples
• Organizing Your Essay

The Meaning of The Essay About Yourself

Writing an essay about yourself can seem awkward. First of all, you have to let some stranger in on a part of your life that is clearly personal. Second, if the essay is for admissions or scholarship purposes, you can feel a bit like a braggart, talking about how you have developed good values, talents, and such. But write the essay, you must. 

Take heart in a couple of things. You are not writing your entire life story, just a piece of it. And the piece or pieces you choose to tell will relate to a prompt you have chosen, usually from at least a few options. So, in writing an essay about yourself, you do have some control over what you choose to reveal.

You also have a choice about tone and style. Some students choose to demonstrate growth, development, skills, and values through humorous events or circumstances; some choose a very serious subject matter. And yet both can be just as compelling to a reading audience. 

In a personal essay, you are not writing your entire life story

The Devil is in The Details

1. As you think about how to write my paper about yourself, your very first step is to study the prompts you have been given. As you look at each prompt, think about events, experiences, or circumstances that relate to that prompt, and write them down. For example, if you are asked to relate a time when you experienced failure and how you worked through it and what you learned from it, list some failures that you might want to talk about. 
2. Make a list for each prompt. 
3. Then, go back into your memories and think about the ones that you can remember most vividly – the ones with all of the details firmly entrenched in your memory. The point is this: without a lot of detail, your story will not engage and allow your reader to get to know you, how you think, how you respond to situations, how you work through challenges, and what you value. 
4. Choose the prompt for which you have the most vivid memories – this will be your best essay.

Making a List and Checking it Twice

Now that you have chosen your prompt, and you have a list of stories to tell that will relate, check through that list and choose one or two that are the best – they may be humorous, poignant, or serious – but they must demonstrate how they relate to the question being asked of you. 

One famous example that is now widely used as an example is that of a student writing an admissions essay to Princeton. She was asked to relate a time when she had to use creative problem-solving to meet a challenge. Her essay told the story of a pesky fly that was in her room, bothering her as she was attempting to get school work done. She tried all of the normal remedies, none of which worked. Then, she decided to get creative and came up with a unique solution. It was considered a “winning” essay by the committee. 

Telling Your Story with Reflections Related to The Prompt

It is one thing to spin a good tale. It is quite another to make sense of that story as it relates to the prompt you have chosen. As you speak to the details of your event or experience, be certain to focus on those that you will be able to spin into the point of the prompt. If you have chosen the right story or stories to tell, this should not be hard to do. But you must wind up your tale with a reflection of what you learned, how it changed you in some way, how it solidified a basic value or belief, or how it resulted in some deep learning.

Introducing Yourself in the First Paragraph

Boring you cannot be. Engaging and intriguing you must be. There are many ways for how to start a college essay about yourself. And you want to be creative as you do this. Here are some personal essay about yourself examples for your opening:

Boring: I am a high school senior who has excelled in science, looking for a college program that will allow me to pursue my passion for physics. My interest in physics began when I got a science kit for Christmas at age six.

Engaging: My first chemistry experiment was a total fail. My grandmother’s kitchen was the scene, and the goal was to make baking powder biscuits. Instead, I used baking soda, and the result was obviously disastrous. This was the first of many lessons I was to learn about the dangers of impulsivity.

Boring: When I turned 15, my family decided that we would spend Christmas day at the local soup kitchen serving dinner to the homeless. Doing that gave me a good understanding of how poor and underprivileged a lot of people are and made me decide that I wanted to work to improve their lives.

Engaging: I was in charge of the mashed potatoes and gravy. As I scooped the potatoes onto each plate and made an indention to hold the gravy, I looked at the face of the person who was to receive this free Christmas meal and wondered what his or her story was. This was the stimulus for my high school service-learning project – interviewing 30 homeless people and writing up their stories. Through this experience, I knew that my life’s work would somehow relate to working with the poor.

These are examples of how to introduce yourself in an essay about yourself. All of them are fine, but the engaging ones will hook your audience far more. And they make you stand out among the competition.

Organizing Your Essay

The format for a personal essay is the same as any essay. You will have that compelling introduction, the body paragraphs that describe your experiences with enough detail to keep interest and to show that you have learned and grown in some way. Your conclusion pulls your experience(s) together to focus on what you believe will be your life’s work or mission.