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Used the search function for a few pages but couldn't find an answer. To those who submitted what they believe to be good personal statements (ie you got into a school where you were around the median and you think it was due to your PS), how long did you spend on it?

I want to spend this quarter getting my letters of rec submitted, and next quarter (3 months while going to school) writing my PS and my statement of purpose, maybe spending about 2-5 hours a week or so. My goal is to get into every school that I apply to, even if that's unrealistic buuut yeah.

Dunno about hours, but I think I have 12 or 13 major revisions saved. I spent about an hour a day for a month writing mine. My subject was tricky to write about though.

_

My whole life.*

4 months. 2 revisions. No other eyes saw it but me. Was very confident about it and felt it took a decent GPA and LSAT score over the top.






*tacky answer

I wrote and editted 3 personal statements at about 8 hours each, scrapped them, and wrote the one I turned in in one go, about 45 minutes, with a little TLS editting help for grammar.

The point of this story is, "Don't be afraid to throw away your work". It was hard to let go of each of the other statements, but in the end, I figured out what I needed to write and got it out.

When I started my PS, it took me 9 days to be satisfied with the first paragraph. It was ~150 f'n words. Then I scrapped the whole thing 6 weeks later. That was hard. Writing hurts. I've always had a high threshold of pain for writing (journalism major), but this 3-page beast took everything I had from July to Oct.

Wow to the above OP.

And thanks for the other responses too (I didn't see them till now).. I guess moral of the story is that I can try to give myself a set amount of time but I'll need to be super flexible and open to it taking a lot more time since it is so complex and significant.