Required Personal Statement and Supplementary Questions?!

[confusedstudent20]

one of the schools i'm applying to requires both a personal statement and for us to answer some questions, but the questions ask very similar things to what i put in my personal statement--like, what my research interests are, professional goals, why i want to enter that field, my experiences, etc. so what would i even put in my personal statement?! i don't want it to be redundant, but i'm so lost as to what could possibly go into the personal statement.....

 

[biisis]

Sounds like they're inviting redundancy there. Perhaps they just want a cheat sheet to scan? 

[confusedstudent20]

i guess that could be it. it's just hard not to repeat myself in both the personal statement and the supplemental questions.

[shadowclaw]

Are there specific things that the school wants you to include in the personal statement? For one of my schools, I had to write a personal statement describing my research interests, proposed methods, and career goals, and then write a supplemental statement that described my past research experience. So the school might want you to break up your SOP into multiple documents. Sometimes this information isn't on the application itself, but somewhere on the department website.