Personal statement help

Mrs Garth Brooks

When writing a personal statement, and you have relevant experience, do you write how much you learned? What you learned? Or just a couple of lines without mentioning duties of the job? Duties are already mentioned in the work experience section. Or writing how much it has influenced me to get a qualification?
I dont have alot of space to work with as it and really want to include the work experience. But cant just write i volunteer at XYZ. I would have to elaborate a bit on it.
Do i have to include hobbies and interests? Like i said, i dont have alot of space to work with and i can just about fit enough into it to cover what they're asking for. Im thinking the hobbies and interests might come up at the interview instead.

qwertytlk

Hi HardLuckWoman;

I couldnt get a sense of wheater you were referring to your Personal statement which you are going to send with your 'additional postal documents' to the CAO or just a college application??? But if you are referring to the CAO, all i can tell you is the advice which iv been given and what I personally did, which is this ;

On the CAO,as im sure you know if you are completing it, there is not alot of room in the various sections to write what you want to write, for example in the Hobbies/Interests section you only have 200 charachters-which is nothing!and in the personal statement box only 1000! So under each box on section B, written in really small print is ; ''If the space provided is insufficent, you may include the extra information with your postal documents''
So what I did was filled out the following sections on PART B of the CAO form as their was plenty of room for them;
-Final Secondary Level qualifications awarded
-Post secondary level qualifications awarded
-Current Studies
-Non-Certificate courses

and for the following sections, where I felt there was not enough space to write what i needed and wanted to say, i wrote in the boxes ; Please See Postal Documents for...
-Employment
-Voluntary/Unpaid work
-Hobbies & Interests
-Explain relevance of your life/educational experience to the course your applying to - aka your personal statement

So what iv done for the ones i wrote 'see postal doc's in, is i have written a parahgraph about my hobbies/interests which i am making relevant to the courses im applying to (which is social care), a paragraph about Voluntary/Unpaid work and for employment i am sending a copy of my CV and then obviously the personal statement is about 1 & a half pages long. The advice I got on how to write a personal statement was basically to deal with the actual question thats on the CAO form (Explain the relevance of your life/educational experience to your application and state your educational goals and objectives) and to keep in mind when writing it;;

1-Where you come from
2-Where you are now
3-Where you would like to go.

You should try and answer everything on the application and put in all the information you feel is relevant and that will give the persons reading your application/personal statement reason to take notice of it (afterall they will be going through thousands of them so you want yours to stand out!) instead of leaving something out because you presume it will come up in your interview as you have to remember that not everyone is actually called for interview-you have to make sure your application makes the college WANT to interview you, so that you can then get a second chance to sell yourself!

Thats the general advice i was given anyway, I hope it will be of some use to you because as i said at the beginning it wasnt clear from your original post if you were even referring to the CAO or not!

Good luck with it all!!

P.s-There are examples of personal statements on the net if you google it you should find some as that may be of help to you-to see what way other people do them!:)

qwertytlk

This website has lots of information and guidelines on writing a good personal statement, they also have sample copies of statements and statements which people have actually written and sent into colleges.

Website is: www.studential.com

Good luck:)