You could argue that your personal statement essay is all about explaining your plans for the future. It can be said that the personal statement is an essay that doesn’t really discuss the past but is focused mostly on the future. You would be right but only partially. The truth is the personal statement essay helps frame your future plans, not in terms of intentions, but in terms of proven potential.
Proven potential what’s that? It may seem like an oxymoron but that’s how personal statements work. It’s one thing to say that you have all this plans for the future but if you haven’t done anything in the past that would substantiate or act as proof regarding the reality of these plans, then you’re just basically blowing smoke.
Think about it. There are many more students applying for the same spots that you want. There’s a lot of competition. The last thing you want is to look like you’re just blowing smoke.
So to do a good job in highlighting proven potential you merely need to do these:
1.You have to lay out a theme for what your plans for your personal future are.
2.You have to tie in the significance of your future personal plans with a greater good.
Helping others; helping an organization; helping an enterprise. Anything that is larger and goes beyond yourself and your personal needs.
3.You have to go through all your past experiences and figure out what skill sets you learn, what revelations you’ve encountered, what insights you’ve realized and how they fit in to your future plans.
That’s how you create the impression of future potential because you are basing your essay on past experiences and past events and past accomplishments and tying them into your future plans. This is much better than just straight out laying your future plans. Nobody wants to look at a list of future intentions. Anybody could do that. Anybody could dream out loud on paper.
The admissions committee is not looking for dreamers. They are looking for people with full potential to follow through what they say they’re going to do and that’s where your personal statement essay comes in. Use its full power to your advantage. Don’t waste it just by listing out what you intend to do. It’s one thing to say you’re going to do something but it’s a completely a different matter when you ground those future plans base on past accomplishments and past skills and activities. See the difference?
One of the Internet’s most popular guest bloggers, Chris Walker, wrote this guest post for MBA Personal Statement, the Internet’s leading MBA personal statement essay writing service.


