Graduate School Personal Statement Examples

Below is a set of US graduate school personal statement examples, covering different subject areas, to help your write your own.

Please use these as inspiration only for your own statement, and do not plagiarise whole sections, phrases or sentences, or your application may be rejected if you are found out to have copied your admissions statement from another source.

Business

Example 1: My father was born in Tehran, Iran. He and his side of the family migrated to America as political refugees. My grandfather worked for the government at the time of the revolution, and when the political situation in the country changed, my father was added to a list of dissidents. My father understood what this meant for the safety of his family, so he made provisions to leave. Read more >>

Example 2: Everyone wants to be inspired by their leaders. History provides us with multiple examples of leaders who—for better (i.e., Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs) or for worse (Adolph Hitler)—inspired people to action and promoted change on such a major scale that the globe was forever changed. Although sources of inspiration are diverse, leadership remains a central factor in the extent to which individuals, especially on teams, are inspired to success or driven to failure. Read more >>

Example 3: James Broughton said, “The only limits are, as always, those of vision”. Truer words have never been spoken, for I believe that vision is the foundation upon which the impossible is built. Leadman University School of Business’ mission is centered on vision because, like me, the leadership of the institution believes that with a strong vision, students can go out and achieve the impossible. Read more >>

Example 4: My father was born in Holguin, Cuba. He and his side of the family migrated to America as political refugees. My grandfather worked for Castro at the time of the revolution, and when Castro became communist, he vowed to kill all his associates, necessitating my family’s departure. After starting and failing multiple businesses in the early 60s, they started the Esperanza Corporation in 1994. Read more >>

Medicine

Example 1: I come from a family of healers. I remember spending nights with my grandmother as a little girl when my mother had to work late shifts as a nurse. Nanna was a doula and raw foodist who studied homeopathy and the healing arts before these things were cool. She did yoga on the shag rug in the living room, and when I got sick, she’d boil a batch of garlic or ginger tea or sersi (which would smell up the whole kitchen) from the bush she kept in the backyard. Read more >>

Example 2: It is with great excitement that I submit my application for consideration for inclusion in the 2021 graduating class from Wellmann Medical College. My parents met at Wellman, so the institution, its values, and all that it means to be an alum of the college have been a part of my identity my entire life. Though I was never forced to choose medicine as my path, the fact that both of my parents are physicians (my father is a pediatric oncologist and my mother is an internist) meant that medicine was always the example I had laid before me growing up. Read more >>

Example 3: I grew up poor on the Southside of Chicago in a neighborhood called Roseland. I was raised by my single mother along with my two brothers in a community comprised mostly of low income black and Hispanic households. I am the oldest, so I always felt a special sense of responsibility to blaze a trail for my siblings. I wanted them to know that they could know more and be more and have more than our parents and those that we saw in the course of our daily lives did. Read more >>

Law

Example 1: When my mother, a native of Michoacan, Mexico, was 28 weeks pregnant with me, she took a trip to visit relatives in Carpinteria, California and stayed long enough to give birth so that I would be a US citizen. I didn’t even know I was a US citizen until I was 10 years old when my parents announced we were moving to the US where my father had secured a job working with a cousin of his in construction. My mother assured me that my two sisters and I would be ok because “we had our papers” and that life in California would be much better for us all. Life had been tough in Mexico, but it was home. Read more >>

Example 2: Both of my parents are attorneys and alumni of Lawman University. I always joke that “I grew up in law school”. Lawman was where I would come and do my homework after school on nights when my father, a professor of Intellectual Property at Lawman, had to teach a late class. I remember eating in the cafeteria and exploring the grounds for hours with my brother in the summertime, playing hide and go seek in the court room, and attending holiday receptions in the Great Hall. Read more >>

Further information

For more tips and advice on applying to graduate school, please see: