How much should I talk about it? I wrote a draft a few weeks ago, and it's about 1200 words long, but I only touch on my past research in a single sentence (because I wasn't sure if there would be a separate research statement or not). I do mention my future goals, my research interests, and why I'm applying to the particular program, but I also take a paragraph to explain scientific awards I've won. Is that something I should include? I've had three or four (depending on how you look at it) major research projects that I can talk at length about. I can write 20+ pages on my research I've done, so I'm really not sure how to concisely summarize these major projects. What should I mention? When I thought there was a separate research statement, I was planning on writing about the questions I was hoping to solve, how I tackled them, the results I found and any problems I faced. Is this the general gist of what I should touch on? Should I mention all the techniques I used? For example, should I say "I expressed a particular protein in a bacterial clone, incubated the protein with enzyme in a buffered solution, took aliquots of the reaction mixture over set time intervals, and ran a Western blot to determine levels of the protein that remained," or should I just say "I determined that protein X was digested by enzyme Y." Is there anything else I need to know about the personal statement?