Effective Truman Personal Statements

(compiled with the input and advice of the leadership of the Truman Scholarship Foundation)

Overview

An effective Truman personal statement reveals clearly and memorably your story emphasizing your achievements, your passions, your motivation for public service, and your potential as a "change agent."

No matter how strong your record of activities and achievements (Items 2-6 of the Nominee Information Form) and your grades, nor how well-prepared your Policy Proposal may be, together they are not sufficient to get you invited to an interview. Through your responses to Items 7-15, you must convince the Truman Scholarship Finalists Selection Committee that you are a potential Truman Scholar deserving of an interview. The Truman personal statement -- collectively, the contents of Items 7-9 and 13-15 of the Nominee Information Form -- is a critical factor in determining your advancement in the Truman competition.

A compelling personal statement will enable you to stand out in a field with other high-achieving persons. It will help you overcome any gaps or inadequacies in your record. It can predispose the interview panel to want to give you a Truman Scholarship rather than to merely hear your case and then decide.

The passions, accomplishments, ambition, and creativity that you present in a carefully prepared personal statement will go a long way toward success in the Truman competition. Your ability to portray well these characteristics should be of enormous value in competitions next year for graduate fellowships and admissions to highly selective graduate schools.

Writing an effective personal statement is difficult. Points in this section should help you, but count on a lot of thought, effort, feedback from the Truman Faculty Representative, rewriting and editing to produce an outstanding personal statement. The skills that you develop in writing an excellent personal statement for the Truman competition will likely be skills that you will employ throughout your professional career.

"The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components."
William Zinsser from On Writing Well.

Recognize that the people who read your Truman application and decide whether you advance in the Truman competition are pros. Veteran members of the Truman Scholarship Finalists Selection Committee have read hundreds of Truman applications. They distinguish easily between the sincere and the insincere, the truth and the puffery, the carefully prepared and the hastily prepared, the substantive and the superficial. Don't try to guess what they want to read. Just write honestly, simply, and clearly about yourself and your aspirations.

Understand your motivations for a career in public service. Think about why you want to be in the public sector as opposed to the potentially more lucrative and less emotionally challenging private sector.

Get a mentor/critic to help you with the Personal Statement. Generally, this will be the Truman Faculty Representative. If you are in a study-abroad program, find a professor to assist you and to encourage you when you bog down in telling your story.

Before answering any of the items, think strategically about yourself and your candidacy. Ask yourself: "What are the most important characteristics and values, goals and ambitions, life experiences and service activities that define who I am?" Then decide which of these you wish to emphasize in your Truman personal statement. Don't try to cover every aspect.

Everybody has a special story - some people just tell their story better. Perhaps you have not had any traumatic experiences nor come from a financially challenged family environment. Still, you have likely had experiences that are interesting to relate and that have been formative in your development as a potential change agent. Share them.

In telling your story, you want to use your responses to Items 7-9 and 15 to bring out some dimensions that are not obvious from reading your list of activities (responses to Items 2-4). Reveal why you are committed to public service.

Read some good personal statements to see how effective and revealing they can be. The Foundation's Guidance to Candidates Page contains links to excellent examples from nominees of responses to Items 7, 8, 9, 12, and 15.

To the extent possible, develop a unified, integrated set of responses. The policy proposal should be related to the areas identified in Items 9, 12, 13, and 14.

Getting Creative with the Truman Personal Statement
Written by Dr. Jane Curlin, Director of Student Academic Grants and Awards, Willamette University.

Writing the personal statement is hard. It is, in fact, the most difficult part of the Truman (or any scholarship) application. At first my students don't believe this. Several weeks later, they sit shamefacedly looking at the few tepid sentences they have managed to compose about themselves, and say: "I had no idea!"

Your biggest obstacle to writing an effective personal statement (responses to Items 7, 8, and 15 in particular) is the way you think. Not what you think; how you think.

When you write your policy analysis, you will sift through journal articles and statistics; you arrange, collate, and analyze.You construct an argument with objective, verifiable data.
The personal statement comes from inside you, passionate and gutsy. Its composition is organic, a natural growth dictated by an obscure, internal logic. You don't "make it up"; instead, you listen. You "get it down."

Writer Julia Cameron believes we have two brains: logic brain and artist brain. Logic brain writes term papers; artist brain writes poetry. To write an effective personal statement, you need color and passion. You need to use the artist inside you. If the personal statement is giving you writer's block, use the following techniques to jump-start your creative flow.

First, you must trick your logic brain into letting you play. It wants everything nice and tidy, arranged in neat labeled cubbyholes. Your artist brain is messy; like playing with finger paints. Lull your logic brain to sleep:

	Engage in a mindless, repetitive activity. Turn off the TV and stereo; go for a run, do dishes, dig holes. Do anything that keeps you busy but allows your mind to wander. Be sure to keep a microcassette recorder handy! Ideas may come thick and fast.
	Begin writing as soon as you wake up in the morning. Don't shower, don't eat (OK, you can have coffee), just turn on the computer. So you're not fully awake; that's good. Neither is your logic brain.

Now do this everyday. Well, maybe not every single day; make appointments with yourself. You won't have brilliant ideas each time. Some days you sit and stare at the computer screen. Nothing happens. You develop imaginary rashes that need immediate medical attention. You suddenly remember a test you should be studying for. But you sit there; you focus; eventually, an idea bubbles to the surface. You start writing.

In these ways you also outwit the "censor": that nasty voice in your head that reminds you, before you've even written a word, that you can't spell, that you never got A's in English. Sometimes the censor waits until you get a sentence or two down, and then sneers: "You call that interesting?" The censor is a perfectionist. To writer Anne Lamott, "perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor." The censor insists, "I just want it to be right!" Instead, you can't write at all.

So write, write anything. And yes, it will be terrible. You're afraid that someone will read it and discover you are a fraud. So you do it again. Don't revise; rewrite.

Revision comes later, when you're dressing it up. First you have to get it down. You'll probably throw out at least half of what you write. Don't think of it as wasted time and effort. I call this process "writing through." You write through the thick layers of fat, slowly trimming it away to get to the meat. Finally you get there: grade A Prime.

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