Personal statement examples for college and grad school

My grandmother has ridden the 42 bus to her doctor every other Tuesday for eleven years, and for the last six she has gotten off one stop early. Her stop at Fulton and Ninth moved across the intersection, and the notice was posted in English, which she doesn't read. So she gets off at Eighth, walks the extra block, and has never once complained about it.

I found out last spring when I rode with her. That night I went looking for the city's transit data, meaning to check one stop. I closed my laptop at two in the morning with a spreadsheet of every stop on the 42 and a question I couldn't put down: how many other people were getting off in the wrong place?

Transit agencies publish their schedules as a bundle of plain text files: one for stops, one for routes, one for every trip and the minute it reaches each stop. I taught myself enough Python to read them, found an archived copy from six years ago and compared the two. Thirty-one stops on six routes had moved more than a block. Most were in neighborhoods like mine, where many riders are older and many don't read English well.

I made a one-page map for each of those routes in Cantonese, Spanish and English, with the old stop crossed out and an arrow to the new one. The senior center on our street taped them by the front door. A librarian asked for copies. A man I had never met stopped me outside the pharmacy to tell me that his stop on the 19 was wrong too, and he was right.

What keeps me up now is not the code. It is the gap between what a system thinks it has told people and what they actually heard. The city did post the change. The data was correct. My grandmother still walked an extra block every other Tuesday for six years.

I want to study civil engineering, and I know most of it will be loads, flows and costs. I want to learn all of that. I also want to keep asking the question the 42 taught me: who is this plan for, and did anyone tell them?

Last Tuesday my grandmother got off at Fulton and Ninth. She said the walk was shorter. She did not mention the map.

The sign-up sheet had forty names in September and four in November. I had started a free math hour for middle schoolers at our public library, and for two months I was proud of it in a way that now makes me wince. I wrote the worksheets. I ran every session. The week I had strep throat, the library taped a sign to the door that said CANCELED, and twelve kids walked home.

It took the fourth nearly empty Thursday for me to see what I had built: a program that only worked if I was in the room.

[…]

In March I spent three Thursdays at a debate tournament two states away. The math hour ran all three weeks. Dalia, a ninth grader who had been one of my first students, taught fractions from a worksheet she wrote herself. It was better than mine.

Every morning at seven, someone in my family walks out to the fence post behind the machine shed, reads the rain gauge and writes the number in a green ledger. My grandfather started the ledger in 1987. My father kept it after him. Since I was twelve, it has been me.

The ledger is not much to look at: columns of decimals, coffee rings, a few pages swollen from the year the shed roof leaked. But the summer I was nine, my father wrote 0.00 for fifty-one days in a row, and on the last of them he wrote two words in the margin: sold heifers. I remember the trailer leaving. I didn't connect it to the ledger until last year, when I typed thirty-odd years of numbers into a spreadsheet for a science fair project and saw that summer as a hole in the graph.

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

In Year 12 our class visited the county record office, and I was handed the burial register for my own village for 1849: twenty-three entries in September alone, most of them children, several sharing a surname. The register gave no cause. Finding one, in a local newspaper and a Board of Health report, took two weekends and taught me that history is mostly asking a document what it leaves out.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare for this course or subject?

My A-level coursework compared how two newspapers on opposite sides reported the 1926 General Strike, and how each chose its numbers. English Literature has made me a slower, more suspicious reader, which turns out to be the same skill.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

One Saturday a month I transcribe handwritten shop ledgers from the 1890s for our town museum. It has taught me to read Victorian handwriting, to mark where I am guessing, and to notice that the shop gave credit to some families and never to others.

For six years I cooked on the line at a 140-seat restaurant, and for most of that time I thought of the health inspector as weather: something that arrived without warning and had to be survived. That changed the week a salmonella case was traced to an egg supplier we shared with nine other kitchens. The county inspector who came to see us did not want to close us. She wanted our invoices, our cooler logs and a list of every dish with raw egg in it, and within a day she had a map of the outbreak that no single kitchen could have drawn.

I left the kitchen to train as an environmental health specialist, and for three years I have done her job. I am good at inspections. I am not yet good at what comes after them: deciding which of 2,000 permitted kitchens to visit first when there are four of us, or showing a county board that a new schedule reduced violations rather than moved them around.

That is why I am applying for the MPH with a concentration in epidemiology. Study design and biostatistics would give me the tools, and the practicum would let me test a risk-based inspection schedule with the department I work for now.

In my third year I joined a lab that studies how salt marsh grasses respond to rising tides. My project asked whether cordgrass seedlings planted at the marsh edge survived better in clumps than alone. I designed the planting grid, measured 1,200 seedlings every two weeks for a season, and found no clumping effect at all, which was not the result anyone wanted. Writing it up anyway taught me more than the fieldwork: how to check that a null result is real, and how to report it so a reviewer believes it. In your program I want to study how marsh plants help or crowd each other as sea level rises, and [Professor Name]'s long-term plots at [field site] are the reason I am applying.

On Tuesday nights I interpret in Haitian Creole at a free clinic, and most of what I translate is not medicine. It is “Do I have to pay for this?” and “Will anyone report me?” and, once, from an older man whose foot wound had gone gray at the edges, “I didn't want to bother anyone.” The doctor and I spent twenty minutes on that sentence before we spent five on his foot. I have watched skilled physicians lose a patient at the door because the patient did not trust them enough to come back. I want to be the doctor who hears “I didn't want to bother anyone” and recognizes it as a symptom.

For two years I staffed the self-help desk at our county courthouse, where people come to sue for small amounts without a lawyer. I couldn't give legal advice, and I said so twenty times a day. What I could do was explain which form came next, and I learned that most people did not lose because their case was weak. They lost because they brought the wrong documents, or none, or came to the right courtroom on the wrong day. A tenant owed $1,900 by her former landlord lost on a deadline she had never heard of. I want to study law to work on the rules that decide cases before anyone reads them.