Need advice for personal statement

[SashaB]

Hi All,

 

I thought I'd get some advice from those of you who'd gotten your personal statement out of the way; I am having a ton of trouble with it.

 

My story is rather complicated.  I left my M.Ed program after two semesters because teaching didn't suit me, then went on to be a special education aide for a kid who had some language and articulation issues (and other diagnoses), and then that school shut down so now I serve as an aide for a kindergartner with autism and language delays in another school.  With regard to what inspired me: in my student teaching I worked daily one-on-one with a student who was nearly mute all day (she didn't even talk in her native language) except in extremely structured "repeat after me" type English activities.  I didn't know anything about speech pathology then; my goal was simply to get her comfortable enough to use language in an expressive and also more spontaneous way, and she did get to be a lot more confident in the end, telling more aspects about her personal life and life in her native country.

 

The thing is, I have a lot of experience that led up to here and I don't know how to cover them all.  I've been an aide to two great kids, both of whom got speech therapy and it's where I learned about the career.  I also have my starting point at student teaching, but nothing I did there was strongly tied into any knowledge of how language development works and also I don't want to emphasize my work in something I ended up not finishing (student teaching).  I also tutor reading with an ELL kid with language issues once a week and have been for two years, and since I'm interested in literacy I feel I need to somehow cover that too.

 

How did you guys go about organizing your ideas into "one idea"?  Since my gpa is mediocre (3.5, 3.8 in unfinished grad school but doubt they'd look at it), I'm really anxious about the essay having to be amazing to get in anywhere .

 

Any advice is appreciated, thank you!

[NCAR823]

Are you applying mostly from CSDCAS? Remember your résumé highlights the less influential experiences. For my statement I ran a bit of a story line with some reflections and forthoughts to keep it interesting. My advice is write it all out today, then read it tomorrow and rewrite again. Find a way to tell how you grew and were directed without describing the details of what you were doing. As I said, the school will see your résumé and can fill in little details from there. Hope this helps!

Edited December 15, 2013 by NCAR823

[burnsl]

Your GPA isn't really the worst. Your experience sounds good. How is you CSD major and GRE scores? Remember you only have so much space. Focus on your strengths instead of your failures and remember the CSDCAS limit is 5,500 characters and you have to mention specific things about each school you like and something about your personal characteristics that would make you a good student and practitioner. I'd use "nonverbal" in reference to the first boy instead of mute.

[SashaB]

Thanks for the help!  Actually, I am out-of-field which I why I am extra stressed about my gpa.  Though I'm willing to go anywhere, I'm constrained to schools that have programs for out-of-field and they tend to have higher statistics (average 3.8 everywhere, UGH).  I did just complete 4 utah state classes with a 3.75 average and will finish my 2nd BA online by end of summer, but as of now I have very little CSD background.

 

Thanks for the character limit alert, never knew that.  It seems probably a good half of my schools will be on the CSDCAS application.

[autismadvocate]

As for your question, I think the advice given on this thread () may help you more than anything I can say. Although personally I'd go the chronological route, skimming over or skipping things you don't think are that important, and emphasizing things you think are. Give them a feel for who you are and what brought you here today. But that's just my thoughts...

 

To add to the non-verbal vs mute thing, I'd just like to ditto that, unless the child happened to have selective mutism for whatever reason in which case you would still not use the word mute and just say they had selective mutism - it's hard to tell which it is from your description. I'd also leave non-verbal in quotes - labels are always controversial and while I think most professionals are cool with the term non-verbal (it's certainly an improvement over mute), autistic people themselves don't tend to like it because it tends to be a bit of a misnomer - after all, the child in question did speak and we're still labeling them 'non-verbal'. Child who didn't speak much might be better. Just a thought.