If you’re wondering how to prepare a powerful opening for your personal statement or diversity statement, you must ensure that the first sentence grabs the reader’s attention. It should be powerful, vivid, and unique. It should lay the groundwork for what your essay will be about.
As with writing any essay, you have a few options. Some of the typical opening strategies include:
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- Using a quote
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- Using contrast
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- Using powerful imagery
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- Using a startling fact or circumstance
None of these strategies are better than the others, but figuring out exactly how to phrase your opening is more art than science and will likely involve several revisions to get the wording and framing just right.
For the purposes of this article, let’s assume we have a student applying to law school. He’s been a server for a couple of years during college to save up extra money and has been balancing that with school. He comes from a typical upbringing and did decent in high school, but he has nothing in particular that he is uniquely passionate about, but he has worked hard during college and taken some classes that really broadened his appreciation for the world. He is an idealist and hopes to one day apply these ideas from the greats into his personal and professional life one day.
Assume further that this is all we know. In reality, there would be more information (e.g., the student’s hopes and dreams, why he believes what he believes, unique life experiences, more about his background, life story, etc.) to craft a cohesive narrative with precise and tailored examples as further discussed in our article about brainstorming that you can find here.
How could the student start his personal statement?
Working in the restaurant industry actually teaches you a lot about life in indirect ways. You learn to deal with complicated customers, multitask, handle stress, upsell, talk to people, think on your feet, etc. While our student does not have any unique passions, he knows the past can teach us about the future and in fact influence the future, but we must choose to take that additional step. It won’t be handed to us. Change starts within ourselves. In fact, working at the restaurant may have actually taught our student more practical knowledge than his four years at university – a contrarian, but an interesting and defendable point.
Based on the above, here are three ways the student could start his essay:
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- I remember working at [restaurant name]. There was one really stressful experience that I won’t forget. I was trying to multitask too many things at once and ended up walking out the entrance door on accident with bottles of ketchup, margaritas, and three split checks and bumping into my coworker. That night I learned more about life than I had in my last three years of school. [Continue the theme and make the points about what the essay will be about.]
- It was a Friday night at [restaurant name]. We were on a two-hour wait like usual. As I was making my rounds, two tables kept calling for me, “[Name], can you please bring us some more ketchup?” “[Name], we need to split this check three ways.” In the kitchen expo area, I carefully placed the ketchup, split checks, and a dozen margaritas for a different table on my large plastic serving tray and rushed out through the swinging door into the front of the house. Before I could process what happened, my manager helped me off the ground and handed me a towel to wipe off the salt and tequila off my cheek. That night I learned more about life than I had in my last three years of school. [Continue the theme and make the points about what the essay will be about.]
- I couldn’t balance a serving tray with two waters on it let alone a tray filled with a dozen large margaritas rimmed with salt, two ketchup bottles, and a few split checks. It hadn’t been this busy since I started working at [restaurant name]. Two customers kept calling me to help them out with some minor requests, but I was too pre-occupied. Though this was my fist job in a restaurant, I usually relied on my intellect to figure things out on the fly. But I had to get this tray out, so I sprinted through the swinging doors into the front of the house. Before I could process what happened, my manager helped me off the ground and handed me a towel to wipe off the salt and tequila off my cheek. That night I learned more about life than I had in my last three years of school. [Continue the theme and make the points about what the essay will be about.]
The student chose this opener to highlight an embarrassing moment and then lays an interesting framework based on that experience for contrasting the practical to the theoretical. The rest of the essay could focus on that contrast with more examples and discussion from school, his life, and his job. The student could also then move to discuss the future and how he plans to channel all of his experiences into the law because the law on a macro scale is a more complex service industry. He could wait until later in the personal statement to tell the reader what happened immediately after that embarrassing experience to mirror his future plans.
Notice how the student makes the same point in each example, but the delivery gets a little better each time. The first example just tells the reader what happens without any depth or emotion, and all the allure is lost. The second example is a bit better, and our student attempts to show the reader the story instead of just telling/summarizing the story. He uses powerful words and images and sets up the story, but he spends too much time in the details and not enough on the underlying thematic points and laying the groundwork for what is to come. Remember — personal statements and diversity statements are short and are usually on two-pages double spaced. In the third example, there is a good balance between detail, generality, and underlying elements. We get hints of balancing multiple responsibilities, relying purely on intellect and not practical experience, and decision making. The third example provides much more depth about the student and does so by only using a few more words than the second example. See our 10 tips for writing personal statements here for more examples.
Certain aspects of your personal statement can be more like example one and “tell” the reader, but the introduction should be more like examples two and three and “show” the reader your story to grab their attention. Importantly, you do not need to insert the the main thematic points as a “thesis” in your introductory paragraph like in a typical essay, but you should be thinking about the broad thematic points you want to make throughout your essay since the introduction lays the framework for what is to come.
The stories you tell in a personal statement or diversity statement do not need to be about you changing the world, overcoming extreme adversity, or winning a sports championship. While grand stories are nice to have, the most important element is that you tell a story deeply personal to you. If you have done that, you have succeeded. hree