There are different types of topics that Universities, Colleges, and Professional Schools may ask as a personal statement prompt. These include the following categories of personal statement questions:
- Open-ended topics that leave you with considerable room to talk about anything you would like to focus on about yourself;
- Topics that require you to talk about your past experiences and how they shaped who you are today in terms of challenges or learning experiences;
- Topics that focus on motivations, ambitions, goals and career plans;
- Topics that ask you to provide a self-assessment related to strengths and weaknesses, an ethical dilemma, or some sort of scenario; and
- Topics that allow you to acknowledge and explain some type of gap in your past related to academics or your career or that explain some other deficiency on the quantitative side tied to grades or tests that takes away from providing an accurate representation of who you really are.