How to Write a Personal Statement in 7 Days

You wake up and look at your phone. It’s October 26th, and you’ve got one week—just seven slim days—to conceive, write, and edit your Common App personal statement prior to the November 1st Early Decision deadline. 

What are you going to do?

You could start by dwelling on how you got here, fixating on why you procrastinated till the eleventh hour, but, no, you wisely decide that—aside from a heartfelt commitment to never, ever, ever again put off such an important writing project till the last minute—rather than dwell on the past, you’re going to focus on the future.

So, you’re wondering how to write a personal statement in 7 days. In this article, we’ll walk you through a schedule to make it happen.

Writing the Common App Personal Statement in 7 Days

That timeline is ambitious, but by no means impossible, especially if you follow HelloCollege’s step-by-step guide below. Strap in, because, over the next week, you’re gonna be staring at your computer screen a little more than usual, as you write your Common App personal statement in just seven days. 

Before we even begin, however, please know that this guide will be drafting (pun intended) from our blog How to Write a College Essay: The Ultimate Guide. In this blog, I’ll be laying out a rough schedule and pointers for organizing your process. But, please, also check out that post for a more detailed discussion of the theory and process of writing your personal statement.  

One more quick note: this schedule is focused on the Common App personal statement only. Many or even most schools will require additional supplemental essays—essays specific to just one school. Even before starting work on your personal statement, you should develop a separate plan to write them as well—just one more reason not to wait till the end of October to start work on your college essays! 

Day 1: Brainstorming and Identifying Your Topic

Let’s cut to it: time is tight, and you need an essay topic. What’s the fastest way to land on one? Assuming you’re not entering this process with a great idea already in hand, the best way to quickly arrive at an essay topic is to work backwards from theme.

Pretty much every college essay is, ultimately, an argument for why your character or personality makes you a strong candidate for college. Yeah, it should capture a little of your soul, and, yeah, it needs to be written in your authentic voice. These are important qualities, and they contribute to a successful essay, but at the end of the day, this thing is an advertisement informing readers of who you are and why you should be admitted to college.

So, why are you a good candidate for college? What virtues do you possess that set you apart as a potentially valuable member of a college community? 

Qualities that admissions officers most often cite as desirable include:

• Intellectual Curiosity
• Resilience or Grit
• Contributions to your community
• Open-mindedness
• Self-awareness
• Drive

But you don’t need to limit yourself to this list. Admissions officers look for, above all, authenticity, so try to identify a personal characteristic that truly captures your identity. Just a few of the other topics you might point to include your empathy for others, your abilities as a leader, your commitment to craft, your creativity, or your ability to support teammates.

Once you’ve figured out what personality trait you want to focus on, start brainstorming examples that illustrate your theme. If you’re writing about what a great team-player you are, think of how you’ve contributed to sports teams or group projects. If you’re interested in creativity, jot down some art works or inventions you’ve created. Or, if you want to write about grit, start brainstorming times when you just refused to give up.

Once you’ve got five or six examples to choose from, you’ve got one more task: reach out to potential editors. This is essential: if you’re going to write your college essays in just seven days, it’s going to require fast feedback, and that’s going to require you to find an expert editor—an English teacher, a HelloCollege Essay Coach, a parent (but first be darned sure that your parent is truly qualified to serve as an editor)—who can also meet the rapid turnarounds you’ll require. Make sure they know your schedule in advance and that they agree that they’ll be able to meet your needs.

And, please, be gracious. Most likely, given your time constraints, your editor is doing you a favor, one that would have been a lot easier on them if you’d started your essay earlier, so don’t forget those pleases and thank yous.

Day 2: Outlining

There are an infinite number of ways to organize a college essay, but here I’ll suggest you employ what we at HelloCollege call a Thematic Survey outline.

Thematic Surveys allow you to combine 3–5 different experiences into a single, coherent essay that focuses on a common theme. To make things more concrete, let’s assume that your essay is about your intellectual curiosity, particularly surrounding robotics.

When you brainstormed ideas, you came up with four examples that demonstrated your interest in robotics: 1) playing with LEGO Mindstorms kits; 2) watching the robotics documentary Fast, Cheap & Out of Control and then reading Cambrian Intelligence by the legendary MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks, whose work was a subject of the movie; 3) freshman year, before you really started learning about robotics, accidentally destroying an Anki Cozmo toy robot in an ill-advised effort to understand how it worked; and 4) researching new vision-processing technologies while developing your robotics team’s latest creation.

The Thematic Survey is divided into four main parts, the first of which, the Intro, should be your most engaging, most cinematic story. You decide that you’ll write about destroying your toy robot, both because it will serve as a good origin story for your interest in robotics, and because you hope that describing the sad squawking noise it made after you tore it apart will be a funny, memorable image to show just how far your curiosity has carried you. You don’t need a super detailed outline, but try to think of a few sensory images and interesting events from the story to add to your outline, so you can really capture the experience in detail.

For your second section, the Reflective Bit (the part of your essay that will be roughly equivalent to a normal essay’s thesis or what journalists call the nut or nutshell paragraph), you need to generate questions to reflect on in order to communicate why you possess this trait and why that trait is valuable to you and to the world at large.

The questions you pose to yourself here will vary depending on your topic, but in the case of our current example of curiosity about robotics, you might ask yourself: When did my interest arise? What aspects of robotics first attracted me? Has my focus within the topic changed over the years? Why do I think robotics is a valuable topic to investigate? How does my investigating robotics benefit the broader world? In what ways has robotics led me to form valuable relationships? You don’t need to answer these questions just yet; just add them to your outline.

For your third section, Minor Examples, return to the other examples you brainstormed, and see which of them you think you could lay out for your readers in just 1–3 sentences. The three remaining examples we cited above (LEGOs, Cambrian Intelligence, and vision-processing) should serve nicely as compact examples. Since these are topics you’ll just touch on briefly, don’t worry about going into great detail. A few bullet points will do.

And finally, for your Conclusion, we often recommend that students end their essay by gesturing toward the future as a college student and imagining themselves demonstrating the personal trait that they’ve highlighted. Perhaps, you grew up in a rural area and witnessed the delicate-but-grueling process of strawberry picking, and so you imagine yourself in a college robotics lab, developing an automated berry-picking robot.  

When you’re done, the whole thing looks something like this:

• Intro – Destroying Anki Cozmo robot
  • Developed curiosity about how robotic arms worked
  • Borrowed dad’s tools to open the body
  • Spent hours tracing wires and circuits to try to understand how parts related
  • Accidentally screwed up its voice control
  • It ended up making sad dying noises
    • (make this a little sad, a little funny)
• The Reflective Bit – Why I’m Curious about Robotics
  • When did my interest arise?
  • What aspects of robotics first attracted you?
  • Has your focus within the topic changed over the years? 
  • Why do you think robotics is a valuable topic for you to investigate?
  • How does your investigating robotics benefit the broader world?
  • In what ways has robotics led you to form valuable relationships?
• Minor Examples
  • LEGO Mindstorms kits
  • Rodney Brooks
    • Fast, Cheap & Out of Control
    • Cambrian Intelligence
  • Researching vision-processing technologies for robotics team
• Conclusion: In college, building berry harvester robot
  • Grew up in Central Valley, visited berry farms, learned how laborious berry-picking is
  • Imagine self in robotics lab, test whether robot hand can grasp berry without smashing it
  • Joke about sneaking a few strawberries between robot trials?

Now, take a break, because tomorrow’s the big day: you finally begin drafting your essay. 

Day 3: Drafting Your Intro & the Reflective Bit

When you sit down to start drafting your intro, don’t think of it as writing an essay. Instead, think of it as telling a story.

Close your eyes and try to imagine yourself re-experiencing the details. What do you notice? Are there distinctive sights, sounds, or smells that you could describe to help us feel like we’re really there? Can you conjure an image in your head that captures the central theme of your essay? That might be a really good place to start the essay, since it will implicitly announce the essay’s themes.

Because our example essay’s about curiosity concerning robotics, you might want to open your essay at the moment when you, for the very first time, pry open your toy robot to begin satisfying your curiosity about what lies within.

From there, just describe what happened. As you do, keep an eye peeled for opportunities to highlight examples of curiosity (“Where does this wire go?” “I wonder if I can see what’s behind that circuit board. . . .” “Each of these transistors has different colored bands. What’s up with that?”), as well as opportunities to include sense experiences that will help us feel like we’re there with you (“When I touched the solder to the hot iron, it melted, sending a thin plume of fragrant pine rosin smoke to fill the air.” “I pushed the robot’s Power button, but instead of the toy’s usual greeting, it released a sad metallic moan, half-dying animal, half-twisting metal. What had I done!?”).

When you’re ready to draft your reflective bit, look over all the brainstorming questions that you posed to yourself in your outline and just start answering them one by one. Free-write for a while without stopping to correct yourself or edit. Just get your thoughts on the page until you’ve got about 200–250 words about why (in our example case) you believe that curiosity about robots is important both to you and to the world at large. Once you’ve brain-dumped, review what you’ve just written and start to give it shape. Make sure you include a topic sentence and that you arrange your musings so that they flow logically from one idea to the next.

When you’re done with your reflective bit, it’s time to sit back and relax—but not for long: tomorrow you’ll be diving right back in.

Day 4: Drafting Minor Examples & Your Conclusion

The Minor Examples section of a Thematic Survey is my favorite part of the drafting process because it’s (usually) the part that requires the least effort. Just give us a straightforward transition sentence (“Since developing this interest, I’ve been hungry for new robotics-related experiences”), then gesture to your other examples. Since you’re really just listing off a few different examples in pretty short order, you only need to write a sentence or two on each topic. Just let us know what you did and (the most important part) why it was important to you, and you’re done with this section of the essay. Easy peasy.

Conclusions can be tricky, but one reliable approach to writing a Thematic Survey-style Common App Personal Statement is to show your reader how the character trait you’ve been highlighting throughout your essay will apply in college. By doing so, you make an implicit case for why that characteristic makes you a potentially valuable addition to a college community. And what, at the end of the day, is your college essay for, other than to make a case for why you are a potentially valuable addition to a college community?

Students often worry how to transition to talking about college. Don’t overthink it. “I imagine myself in a college robotics lab, a pile of squashed strawberries in the trash beside me” will do the job just fine. Try to communicate your excitement and your continued curiosity, and try to help your admissions reader imagine you as a current student.

Once you’ve finished your rough draft, take a deep breath and congratulate yourself. The hardest part of the process is over, but you’re not done yet, because you still need to edit your essay. But we’ll talk through that tomorrow.

Day 5: Evaluate, Revise, & Send Out for Copy Editing

With your rough draft completed and a good night’s sleep under your belt, it’s time to give your essay its first real read-through and polish.

During your first pass, read your essay with your original outline beside you, checking to ensure that you followed the organization you initially laid out. If you find points where your essay diverges from your outline, don’t freak out; instead ask yourself if the essay still makes sense, if your reader will still receive all the info they need in the correct order, if anything you might have missed can be done without. Once you understand where you diverged from your initial plan, it’ll be easier to revise the essay to get it back on track, or to amend your plan to incorporate an unexpected deviation.

Importantly, because this blog post’s 7-day schedule assumes you’re operating under extreme time constraints, it does not allow for outside editors to provide feedback on your content and organization. That means you need to be totally sure that your essay’s argument (and all the signposting, like topic sentences and transitions, that make an argument legible) are in place and functional. Notably, if you do have a few extra days’ time to finish your essay, getting feedback on those topics is the best way to spend it. 

That said, for the purposes of this blog post, we’re riding a bullet train, so, if you notice any glaring problems with the prose (misspellings, grammar errors, bits that just sound clunky or funky or are hard to follow), correct them now. Then do another read-through, this time aloud: your essay should read easily and should feel like your actual speech. This may seem trivial, but the single most important quality that admissions readers look for in a college essay is authenticity, and nothing communicates authenticity like voice. By ensuring that the essay’s voice matches your own, you’ll be ensuring that your reader feels like they’re being introduced to the real you.

Now’s the time to send your draft off to your outside reader, and to ask them for copy edits. This can be a trusted teacher, counselor, family member, friend, or essay coach. Again, make sure that they know that you’re comfortable with the essay’s content, and that you just want help polishing the prose, because you’ve got a schedule to keep and just two days to finish your essay.

Day 6: Final Copy Edit & Send to Proofreader

Once you get your edits back from your outside reader, implement any changes that they suggest, but make sure that they don’t accidentally obscure your voice. Then, read the essay aloud one final time, tweaking it so it flows as naturally as possible.

At this point, it’s time to start the proofreading part of the essay editing process, looking for any lingering low-level errors—typos, misspellings, punctuation mistakes—before sending it back to your editor for them to proofread. Again, make sure they understand the level of feedback you want (you don’t have time to re-write your essay at this point, so their telling you it’d be a good idea to do so will only cause you unnecessary heartache). And make darned sure they know your deadline and you know when to expect your essay back.

Day 7: Final Proofread & Submission

Once you receive your final edits from your proofreader, all that’s left is to give it a final once-over, again looking only for low-level errors. You might feel tempted to make bigger changes at this point. Don’t. It’s too likely that you’ll introduce more errors as you do. If it’s not something forehead-slappingly simple, just leave it as it is. 

Now you just need to submit your essay to the Common App, and then sit back and wait for those acceptance letters to roll in—after having written your college essay in just seven days!

Conclusion

With focus, intention, and a clear plan, you can write a compelling personal statement in 7 days. But learning how to write a personal statement in 7 days isn’t just about time management—it’s about showing up, writing authentically, and enlisting help. So take a deep breath, follow the schedule, and remember: progress over perfection. November 1st is coming, but you’ve got this!

Whether you have two years or two weeks to meet your college application deadlines, HelloCollege is here to help—reach out to schedule a consultation with an expert at any stage of your college admissions journey.