Session 10/30

This week's session was fairly normal. I ended up only having one student the entire time because my other two appointments didn't show up. The student who did show up was Elizabeth and she wanted to go over her personal statement for graduate school. I thought that it was interesting that we were working on her personal statement right after we did the presentations in class and that was someone's topic. So when I was helping Elizabeth with her statement, I tried to keep in mind some of the stuff that I learned from the presentation such as key things to look out for. Elizabeth's statement was stellar in the information that it had-- she had great credentials and worked with a lot of organizations for community projects. However, it kind of read like a list or a resume. What we decided to do was see where we could add some color to the statement to make it come alive. She did a whole project in Costa Rica where she worked with children and I told Elizabeth that it would be great to see some action from this project. Something that I have learned when building my resume and writing cover letters as I prepare to go out in the real world, is that they want to see what you did, not just hear about it. So that was the main theme we created in Elizabeth's statement-- to show the reader what she worked on. She also said that she wanted to look at grammar and punctuation, but it turned out that she didn't really have an issue with that. However, I was reading it through, I would read aloud sentences that sounded a bit wonky so she could hear it and then we worked together to fix it. Elizabeth was prepared and pretty much knew what needed work and so it was easy to go from there and fix things. That also allowed us the freedom to be a bit nit-picky at the end because the overall statement was cleaned up well.