Emphasize underprivledged background?

Hi All - I need to start preparing my personal statement for my grad school applications due in December. They all requre one but I have heard that it is fine to use the same statement for multiple schools. My question is this: Do you think wise to emphasize the fact that no one in my family has gone to college and that I grew up relatively poor? Are the professors interested in that sort of think in terms of one's background? Or is it best to leave all of those sorts of family and childhood experiences behind and emphasize only relevant scholarly, academic, educational experiences such as research fellowships, research papers, and so on.

Thank you in advance for your responses.

Derek

I think you can do both in your personal statement. talk about your experiences because they are unique to you. But move on from there to talk about your academic work too.

talk about your experiences because they are unique to you

Very true. You want to stand out in some way. Keep in mind that everyone will be talking about how fancy their academic background is. they went to fancypants school and worked with Dr. Fancypants. They wrote a fancy paper called "Fancypants: Rethinking fancy pants." You can stand out by telling them that you:"

grew up relatively poor

"

so you should do it

sharko,

LoL you crack me up with your response.

But i agree that you have to stand out in some way. I talked about my volunteer work a lot in my personal statement and I got accepted to most of the schools to which I applied. I chose to focus on that work because I knew that others would not. Still, I included my more applicable academic work as well. I am in a social work program, however, so my volunteer work remained relevant.

sarah p.

Hello All! I'm so glad to have found this forum - I'm in the process of applying to schools this fall/winter and am happy to have a place to go with questions and stuff. Hopefully I can be of help as well, since I've gone to a few "applying to grad school" events.

Anyways, just wanted to say everyone I've talked to affirms that it's a GREAT idea to include information about your background (disadvantaged, poor, minority, etc.), so long as you include it as being RELEVANT to your academic development, scholarly interests, and career goals. They don't want a sob story, so make sure that you don't belabor the "poor me" aspects of your background. Instead, focus on the "what I've learned" aspects of your background.

Oh, and SharkO, that "fancy pants" stuff was too funny!

[JC]

yea, I think that's right too. They don't want to hear your sad stories of childhood poverty unless that's what motivated your current situation.