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Psychology - Critique
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With this personal statement, you present yourself as a highly enthusiastic and intellectual candidate. You do an excellent job of linking your work as a homeless specialist with your desire to study psychology. I also like how you present political science and psychology as complementary subjects that combine to form a more complete picture of human behaviour.
You have the information necessary to construct an excellent personal statement. To allow the essay to reach its potential, I focused on building a compelling introduction, improving the essay's overall organisation, and substituting concrete language to replace vague, clichéd wording.
First, you always want to begin with a compelling introduction to arouse the interest of a weary admissions officer, who may have spent all night sifting through dozens of personal statements.
When I read the last third of your essay, including your concluding statement, it was clear that you intended to emphasise your experience working with the homeless. However, you wait too long to introduce this vital information, resulting in an unfocused personal statement that goes from one topic to another without effective transitions or a cohesive theme. I corrected this problem by restructuring your statement to begin your experience as a homeless specialist. However, it would be helpful if your information could be more specific; therefore, I began with a concrete anecdote inferred from the information you provided. For example, instead of saying, "every once in a while - a determined individual would request assistance, enter treatment and eventually find his way back into society," you should provide a specific example of one person who did this. I used a generic name to introduce this person, but you should go back and substitute your own details (don't use the person's real name in order to protect his or her confidentiality).
Your essay now begins with a gripping statement that compels the reader to keep going. You now have a nicely stated theme-that you seek answers to human behaviour in order to pursue a career in the government. Because the revised essay expresses this theme early in the essay, you can now organise the supporting information, such as your political science interests, to reflect this idea, resulting in a much more unified essay. To improve the flow of your entire statement, I focused on adding transitional sentences so that you can progress smoothly between paragraphs.
Your essay suffered at times from a lack of clarity. Your discussion of "the hows and whys" behind political science and psychology contains a good idea, but the awkward language obscures your meaning. I reworded sentences and added information to eliminate this confusion and clarify your ideas. Note also that you never mention your specific duties as a homeless specialist. I inferred your duties by examining the rest of your information, but be sure to go back and make sure that this information represents what you actually did.
To improve further, you can go back and add a little detail about what theories and authors you learned about after you took an interest in psychology. As it stands now, you say that you read "voraciously" but you never explain what you read and what you learned. You can also clarify your career goals. As it stands now, your goal to "aid members of the public" is a little vague-precisely how do you hope to help them?
The revised personal statement is well organised, thematically cohesive, and strongly worded. You have a compelling, detailed introduction and the entire statement contains a varied sentence structure, vivid transitions and active-voiced language. The admissions committee will certainly be impressed with your thoughtful, questioning nature and the depth of your interest in psychology.
