Graduate and professional school essays

The same method, whatever the program

I have worked with applicants to law, business and medical school, to a combined BS/MD program, to a technology master's, to a European business school, and to a graduate architecture program — a statement of purpose rather than a personal statement, which is its own genre. The prompts differ and the conventions differ. What does not change is that a committee is reading a stack, that most of the stack sounds alike, and that the only durable advantage is a specific true thing told well.

So there is no separate track and no separate price list. The same packages cover a Common Application essay, a law school statement, a fellowship application, and whatever your program calls its version.

What tends to be different about adult applicants

• You have more material and less time. A career gives you real scenes. It also gives you a job, which is why sessions get scheduled around your calendar rather than a school day.
• Your writing has been professionalized. Years of workplace prose trains people toward the passive, the hedged, and the summary. Undoing that is often the whole engagement.
• You are explaining a change. Career changers have to make a pivot sound like a through-line rather than a whim, which is the same structural problem a transfer applicant has.

Fellowships, scholarships, and the ones with no category

Fellowship and scholarship applications are frequently the most demanding writing in this whole field — short, highly specific, and read by people who know the subject far better than an admissions generalist does. They also get left to the last week more often than anything else.

One menu, every kind of application

There is no separate graduate rate and no separate professional-school package. The packages on the main page apply to any application that asks for a personal statement. Longer engagements cost more only because they contain more essays, not because of the degree.*