Mph Personal Statement

While you’ll still want to earn the strongest grades and test scores you can (usually the GRE, though many schools also accept the LSAT, MCAT, or GMAT), especially if you’re planning to apply to top-tier programs, demonstrating experience in the public health field will be just as important. This might take the form of a few of the following: work experience, volunteer experience, research, other extracurriculars, or related coursework.

How to Write an Amazing MPH Personal Statement

Learn what to include in your public health personal statement, plus an MPH personal statement example

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: How to write your MPH personal statement

Part 3: MPH personal statement example

Part 1: Introduction

Are you considering a career in public health? If you’re looking to work as an epidemiologist, biostatistician, nutritionist, healthcare administrator, or any of the many roles within the vast and varied field of public health, applying to public health school is likely in your future.

You can earn various degrees in public health school, but the most common, and the most widely recognized, is the Masters of Public Health, or the MPH.

To get into a top MPH program, not only will you need strong grades and test scores, you’ll also want to demonstrate experience in the field. That’s why a memorable personal statement that showcases your experiences and conveys your journey through public health will help you stand out from the crowd.

In this guide, we’ll cover the nuts and bolts of how to write a standout personal statement for your MPH application. We’ll help you understand what your personal statement should include and how to tackle the writing process. Plus, we’ll show you a real-life example essay and break down why it works.

Without further ado, let’s get into understanding the MPH personal statement.

What’s the purpose of the MPH personal statement? What should it convey?

Your personal statement is a chance for you to reveal the qualities and experiences that make you a worthy MPH candidate beyond what’s written on your transcripts and test scores. It’s also an opportunity to demonstrate what sets you apart from the rest of the applicant pool. In short, it provides a space in which you can convince public health school admissions committees that they should accept you into their program. As such, it’s one of the most important parts of your MPH application.

We’ll get into the specific points you’ll want to cover in your personal statement in just a bit, but the central mission of your personal statement should be to give admissions committees a clear sense of the following:

• What makes you a strong candidate
• Why you want to work in public health
• How their specific program will help you accomplish your goals

An excellent personal statement will link these pieces of information in order to create a cohesive narrative of your path towards the MPH and beyond.

What are MPH admissions committees looking for?

Admissions to MPH programs differ from admissions to some other types of graduate programs in that they often prioritize experience in the field. While great transcripts never hurt (and should certainly still be a focus), the bar for MPH admissions in terms of GPA and test scores is typically not as high as it is in hyper-competitive grad school fields like medical school and law school.

While you’ll still want to earn the strongest grades and test scores you can (usually the GRE, though many schools also accept the LSAT, MCAT, or GMAT), especially if you’re planning to apply to top-tier programs, demonstrating experience in the public health field will be just as important. This might take the form of a few of the following: work experience, volunteer experience, research, other extracurriculars, or related coursework.

In fact, many MPH programs only admit applicants who already have some experience in the field. For example, Johns Hopkins (currently ranked the top public health school by U.S. News) requires MPH applicants to have at least two years of relevant post-baccalaureate work experience, a related doctoral degree, or two years of medical school under their belt. Other public health schools, such as Harvard and Yale, to name a couple, have similar requirements.

Because demonstrating experience is so important to putting together a strong MPH application, your personal statement is a valuable opportunity to highlight your experiences and demonstrate that they make you a great candidate. You’ll want to invest considerable time and attention into this part of your application if you want to stand out.

Part 2: How to write your MPH personal statement

The majority of public health schools use the centralized SOPHAS application in their admissions processes. In SOPHAS, the personal statement—called the “Statement of Purpose and Objectives”—allows space for 1,500 words.

However, many MPH programs have their own content and length requirements for the personal statement. Check the guidelines for each program to which you’re planning to apply. While this might sound like the beginning of a complicated process, especially if you’re planning to apply widely, a great approach to keeping the writing process simple is to start by creating one basic personal statement that you can later tailor as needed.

Since most programs ask for personal statements that are between 500 and 1,000 words in length—a 500 word maximum is also fairly common—we suggest beginning by aiming for a 500-word basic statement with the understanding that, for some programs, you will have the opportunity to go more in depth.

Brainstorming topics for your personal statement

Before you begin writing your personal statement, you’ll first need to figure out what it is you want to say. As essay prompts are usually fairly broad and open-ended—most can be distilled down to “why do you want to earn an MPH from our program?”—it can be tough for applicants to know where to start.

Remember that your public health experiences will be the cornerstone of your personal statement. As such, you’ll want to keep an up-to-date CV handy as you’re brainstorming essay ideas.

To start the brainstorming process, grab a notepad and a pen and answer the following questions. Feel free to jot down anything and everything that comes to mind.

• Why do you want to work in public health? How did you arrive at this realization?
• What educational, work, research, volunteer, or other extracurricular experiences have been formative in your public health journey? What did you take away from them?
• What do you plan to do during and after your degree? What are your professional ambitions?
• Why is an MPH, specifically, the best degree to help you accomplish your career goals (as opposed to other public health degrees or an MD, for instance)?
• Why do you want to attend the specific program(s) that you’re applying to? How will those programs help you achieve your ambitions?
• As a student, what would you contribute to an MPH program?

A strong public health school personal statement should not only answer all of the above questions, it should also connect your answers so that they form the backbone of a compelling narrative. Your personal statement should tell the story of what has led you to pursue an MPH and a career in public health.

Other things to consider as you’re writing your personal statement

If you have accomplishments that you’re proud of (such as publications, presentations, fundraisers you’ve put on, or anything else that’s relevant to public health), you may want to think about including these details in your personal statement, too.

Keep in mind that, because public health is a broad field with many sub-specialties, a great personal statement should reflect a relatively narrow focus of interest that’s backed up by your experiences. Simply stating your general passion for public health will come across as vague and unknowledgeable. It won’t help you stand out in a pool of applicants.

The area of interest you write about in your personal statement isn’t binding—admissions committees understand that people’s interests naturally change over time. However, demonstrating a specific focus now shows that your decision to apply for an MPH is thought through and well founded.

An effective personal statement should also be customized to reflect the specific MPH program to which you’re applying. Aside from adjustments in length, most of the tailoring that you’ll do after you write your basic personal statement will be to make it program specific. Ask yourself what values, curricula, faculty, or other resources compel you toward a given program. By including information about how specific elements of a program will help you accomplish your goals, you’ll make the argument that not only is the program a good fit, it’s also an inevitable next step in your trajectory.

For even more advice, head over to our guide to graduate school statements of purpose. This post includes more tips and tricks for effective brainstorming and will also help you learn how to structure an amazing personal statement.

Part 3: MPH personal statement example

Meeting our applicants

To give you a sense of how different applicants handled their MPH personal statements, below we’ll meet three applicants and learn about what they wrote. Then we’ll read a full-length personal statement from one of these applicants and discuss what we can learn from her example.

• Derek: Derek graduated from college last year as a sociology major and currently works as an administrative assistant at a community health nonprofit in Boston. In his personal statement, he describes how a medical sociology course in college led him to pursue, among other things, a summer internship at the World Health Organization and on-campus volunteer work as a peer counselor. His goal is to continue working in the nonprofit world to advocate for increasing access to healthcare for disadvantaged populations.
• Mariana: Mariana is three years out of undergrad with a degree in Environmental Science. She currently lives in Florida, where she works as an assistant in a marine science lab. Her personal statement focuses on how, through her work analyzing water quality, she became interested in the way that environmental conditions and climate change intersect with public health and health disparities, especially in coastal communities, and how this led to her career goal of working on environmental policy in a governmental agency.
• Megan: Megan is originally from New Zealand but is currently completing a DPD program at Cornell. She is interested in nutrition, especially as it pertains to mental health treatment and psychiatric and neurological disorders, which stems from experiences in her personal life and from volunteering as a nutrition educator at home in New Zealand and abroad. Her goal is to work as a public health dietitian and behavioral science professional. We’ll read her personal statement below.

An example of a great MPH personal statement

This personal statement comes from Megan’s application to Yale’s MPH in Social and Behavioral Sciences program:

My fascination with the role of nutrition in healing complex diseases stemmed from helping loved ones during my childhood constructively handle mental health challenges. When I was nine, I lost my father to cancer and watched my mother and brother’s mental health decline over a decade of processing his death. At the time, I didn’t have a strong grasp of how nutrition could’ve helped them in the same way that I do now. I began learning about this topic when I sought out immersion experiences with local organizations in New Zealand (NZ) and Cambodia to pursue my interest in nutrition and explore the benefits of a healthful diet within those communities.

Through a one-month group volunteer expedition in Cambodia, I shared ideas with 15 local families on how improving diet quality could positively affect their overall health. They informed us that our culturally sensitive nutrition lessons supported them in eating healthfully, which led to improvements in physical and mental well-being as they faced trauma following their country’s devastating 1979 genocide. This showed me that mental health benefits can be reaped from diet as the result of both beneficial nutrient properties and the establishment of community through uniting people around food. Upon my return home, I applied my newfound appreciation for socialization while sharing healthful meals with my family in NZ, which reinforced our sense of togetherness. As my belief in the power of nutrition for stabilizing mental health was strengthened, I became determined to bolster my knowledge of diet as a psychiatric therapy.

To continue empowering individuals facing psychological trauma to choose healthful diets in another context, I decided to visit the United States, a country known for its societal diversity. I received a merit-based scholarship from my home institution to study abroad at Cornell University. To facilitate my exploration of nutrition’s role in psychiatry within the United States’ diverse populations and to improve my nutrition counseling skills, I continued my studies at Cornell in the Didactic Program in Dietetics.

While at Cornell, I realized that the purpose of nutrition care for mental health lies not only in facilitating more positive emotions psychologically but also in restoring nutritional balance physiologically. I’ve also learned that many populations of low socioeconomic status who consume low-quality diets, due to complex social reasons sometimes beyond their control, also face mental illness in conjunction with their health disparities. To better understand mental illnesses associated with racial inequities, I volunteered as a nutrition educator at AltaMed’s 10-week obesity program to provide nutrition care for a Hispanic group. Through co-taught nutrition lessons, I built rapport with parents who spoke little English and their children by tailoring teaching plans and using hands-on exercises. I also used nutrition counseling with individuals experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder and autism spectrum disorder to reinforce how they could use diet to positively influence their behavioral and brain health, both mentally and neurologically.

My experiences with diverse communities internationally and in the U.S. have strengthened in me the importance of making nutrition care for mental health available to all. They have also inspired me to deepen my understanding of how diet can be used to improve behavioral, mental, and neurological health for various populations, regardless of one’s mental state, socioeconomic status, or ethnicity. These are some of the reasons why I want to attend Yale University’s niche Master of Public Health in Social and Behavioral Sciences.

The evolution of my interest in understanding and advocating for nutrition’s role in brain health was further strengthened this past summer. I was sitting in a doctor’s office waiting for my boyfriend when he walked out and told me he was diagnosed with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), a debilitating neurological disease. Although this news was challenging to grasp, I felt hopeful that helping my family through a similar challenge previously, along with the knowledge gained from my current research writing, would prove valuable here.

Coincidentally, eight months prior, I co-founded a collaborative article-writing project to showcase nutrition’s profound role in brain and behavioral health with my former professor, a Cornell mitochondria and nutrition researcher. In this project, “Eating for Happiness,” I review evidence on dietary mechanisms that contribute to the development of neurological and mental illnesses as well as previous interventions aimed at targeting these mechanisms. Subsequently, I use these findings to recommend new population-level interventions that could reduce mental illness mortality rates, such as conducting nutrition lessons at psychiatric treatment centers. In one specific article I co-authored with a dietitian, we synthesized over 150 articles on nutrition’s ability to alleviate psychiatric and neurological disorders, including depression and Alzheimer’s. This article has been accepted for publication by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics’ Behavioral Health Group.

My desire to continue promoting the connection between nutrition and neurological health expanded when I learned that my co-founder of “Eating for Happiness” is also a researcher for Cornell’s federally-funded ME research center. The serendipity of working with an expert on this currently incurable disease while living with my partner who has ME has inspired me to approach ME treatment with a nutrition component. For my next article, I plan to promote nutrition interventions as a powerful adjunct to treat behavioral health issues by linking diet to ME.

Studying and working abroad to provide evidence-based dietary recommendations have resulted in my desire to drive a paradigm shift in our global perception of nutrition as important for both brain and body health. Nutrition produces not only psychological benefits that improve mental health, but also dramatic biological changes that support brain function. As Yale’s MPH in Social and Behavioral Sciences addresses nutrition as a health promoting behavior that comes with psychosocial challenges faced by many communities worldwide, I am pursuing this program to become a well-rounded public health behavioral science and nutrition professional. It is the ideal program for me to further explore how powerfully diet can impact behavioral health and to apply my knowledge in practice settings, especially through collaboration with Community Alliance for Research & Engagement within Yale’s unique Public Health practicum course.

After the MPH, I plan to integrate my nutrition counseling skills and nutritional psychiatry research to work with other healthcare professionals as a public health dietitian and behavioral science professional, while continuing advocacy work around ME. I hope to improve nutrition access for all who seek holistic care, especially those who struggle with mental illness, as dietary treatment should be a human right. Ultimately, Yale’s MPH would allow me to combine the science of nutrition and mental health with the art of compassion to promote nutrition as a therapy to all.

Clocking in at around 1,000 words, Megan’s personal statement is on the longer side. While some applications might call for a more succinct approach, the fact that Yale permits a longer essay gives her plenty of room to go into detail regarding her experiences in public health and her career goals as a dietitian and behavioral science professional.

What’s working here?

• We get a clear sense of what motivated Megan to become interested in nutrition and to seek out experiences in the field, as well as highly detailed descriptions of what those experiences entailed. As such, this personal statement allows Megan’s public health experiences to shine, which is the right strategy for an MPH application.
• By laying out her experiences chronologically and concluding with her career aspirations, we get a sense of how Megan’s path through public health has gradually progressed and why attending Yale’s MPH program is a logical next step for her. While it’s by no means necessary to take a chronological approach in your own personal statement, it’s a structure that can be used to easily create a sense of narrative, as Megan did here.

Final thoughts

While great grades and test scores are the foundation of any graduate school application, for the best chances of admission to your dream MPH program, experience in the public health field is also a must. The personal statement is a space in which you can highlight the value of your experiences and connect them to your passions and career ambitions. A strong personal statement will go a long way toward convincing admissions committees that you’d be an ideal student for their program and an impressive addition to the public health field.

How to Write Your MPH Statement of Purpose

If I’ve noticed any single trend in grad admissions over the last few years, it’s this: public health is blazing hot! Before COVID, relatively few students applied to MPH programs. Now, it’s easily the most popular (and thus most competitive) field I encounter among STEM students. Brown’s applications more than doubled last year. Claremont’s increased by 66%. Hence, with so many applicants clamoring for spots in Biostats and Epidemiology programs, it means your MPH statement of purpose is more important than ever. Luckily, I’m about to tell you how to blow your competition away…just the way Yichen did.

A Model Student with a Model MPH Statement of Purpose

When I first met Yichen, he was a senior at a respectable East Coast state university. An Applied Math major, he had fantastic quantitative skills. Yet, he had a glaring weakness in his candidacy: He’d taken zero Public Health classes and claimed little experience with advanced statistics. Not exactly a shining quality for a student applying to Top-10 Biostats MPH programs. Fortunately, Yichen had a few things working in his favor: 1) he’d had multiple great research experiences, 2) he had a huge heart and big goals, and 3) he was an unusually thoughtful writer for an international STEM student. His first draft did have the same problems most students have: lack of structure, and a difficulty explaining WHY his dream school would be uniquely beneficial for him. Yet, he had humanistic goals and the ability to explain why they were important – a very rare quality. Once he found an SOP structure that works, and learned how he could turn his weaknesses into strengths, Yichen’s MPH statement of purpose transformed into something profound.

The Results

Honestly, Yichen only received one offer…because he was immediately accepted to his #1 target school and then happily canceled the rest. (Hot tip: be like Yichen. If you get into your top program, and aren’t fishing for scholarships, cancel the rest of your applications so other students have a chance!) Let’s read Yichen’s sample essay to see what made him so competitive. Then, let’s break down all the qualities that make it profound, and see what tips we can extract to make your SOP equally awesome.

A Successful Sample MPH Statement of Purpose

When considering the state of healthcare in China, my home, I think of my own grandmother. She grew up in an ordinary village. Like many who suffered the ravages of longtime high-intensity farm work, her reward has been nearly intolerable arthritis and osteoporosis. When young, she endeavored to pull her family out of poverty. Now, she has to endure the unbearable pain of illness herself. Her case is not rare. After four decades of reform and development, aging and elder-related diseases are the primary obstacles facing the Chinese medical community. This will require more long-term care facilities, and more people processing the increasing amount of data on health. Perhaps more worrying is how the younger generation has not learned from these lessons. Today, millions of driven workaholics pour their hearts and souls into their work, believing that modern health insurance will be their panacea. They believe they can exchange health for income when young, and income for health when old. Now, they too have begun to age, and the lack of awareness about health and hygiene have become equally serious public health concerns. High blood pressure, mental illness, and office-work-induced orthopedic issues are increasingly appearing in young people. Though the pathologies are different from our elderly generation, the result is the same: an unhealthy population and a healthcare community not fully equipped to treat it. Therein lies my desire to study in the Biostatistics program in the Gotham University School of Public Health. I hope to play a role in analyzing the complex health issues my country faces, to better support public initiatives to treat our aging population. Fortunately, I believe that my education in Applied Mathematics at Stark University has given me excellent preparation for the focused study of Biostatistics. I have excelled in coursework such as Applied Linear Algebra, Differential Equations for Applications, Partial Differential Equations, and Numerical Analysis. This latter course was particularly beneficial, as it helped me achieve competence with MATLAB and deepened my understanding of the generation and propagation of numerical errors, stability, and the computational speed of algorithms. Even so, I admit to a weakness in general understanding of the public health field, and a lack of advanced courses in statistics. For this reason, I am eager to enroll in coursework such as Longitudinal Analysis of Public Health Data and Categorical Data Analysis at Gotham. This will be the best way for me to bolster my background in public health. Furthermore, I am doubly eager to take Global Environmental Health and Global Issues in Social and Behavioral Health, because these will directly showcase public health problems and solutions that other countries have faced, and provide references for future problems in China. Luckily, my research experiences have already given me a useful introduction to the programming and analytical skills required of such work. Since August 2020, I have worked as a research assistant under Professor Ororo Munroe on a project titled: “Image Analysis with Neural Network Modeling for Cyclone Damage Estimation.” This ongoing project seeks to help insurance companies more effectively estimate damage caused by megastorms, and as an assistant, I help Professor Munroe verify the validity of established neural network models, and explore how to apply collected data toward achieving research objectives. The experience increased my proficiency in Python, as well as and my ability to analyze practical research problems. I have also received health-focused research training with Professor Otto Octavius, Director of the Health Management Center from Empire Orthopedic Hospital in New York. Starting in July 2020, I joined his online research project titled: “Analysis of Intervention Modalities in Bone Health Status of Menopausal Women.” In this project, I was responsible for arranging bone-mineral density data into logical categories within visual tables. In Excel, I classified iron, ferritin, and transferrin examination results from blood samples of 100 female testers, and communicated with my supervisor frequently to ensure that I was correctly prioritizing key data packets and setting up data relationships. To be more specific, I analyzed the relationship between serum iron and bone mineral density results (negative/positive) by using age as a dependent variable. Admittedly, when involved in Professor Octavius’s research, I did not fully understand many of the medical nuances, nor what the data ultimately represented for a professional in the field of health. This, however, is why I want to study at Gotham. I want to fully participate in public health research, and thus become a health statistical analyst capable of contributing to real population-wide change. My long-term goal is to participate in research on genetics and disease in either orthopedic hospitals or the pharmaceutical industry. I am deeply interested in applying data analysis and modeling to the field of bone health, and hope to participate in research on prevention of long-term disease and occupational health issues. This is something that affects everyone. As China and all developed and developing nations face unprecedented public health problems, it will be necessary to design more proactive strategies by leveraging the power of data analysis with smart technology. Studying at Gotham will be the perfect preparation for this. I am particularly intrigued by the work of Professor Barbara Gordon, whose research modeling population health, disease spread, and prophylactic social behaviors align with my goals in public and occupational health. Her studies of personally-generated data (using geospatial methods and social media data mining) seem particularly relevant to emerging global trends. These are precisely the types of projects I hope to engage in my future career, aggregating more efficient, smarter, and more detailed data that provides reference for health workers and makes it easier for the public to understand. Health problems are inevitable for all of us, in every country, and we only have one life. Thus, the ultimate purpose of my education in biostatistics and public health is to serve life. To me, when I work with data, the numbers I face are not simply numbers; they represent the health of actual people, like my grandmother and many others. The numbers are alive. China’s health sector has yet to establish comprehensive health data to help the elderly, but people do not stop aging. By studying biostatistics at Gotham University, I will take an important step toward working as a statistical analyst in a hospital or health management center in the future, and thus play a role in bringing improvements to a public who desperately needs new and novel solutions.

What’s Great About This SOP

1. Smart Questions: Asking big, humanistic research questions is one of the 5 traits of successful grad applicants, and Yichen did this wonderfully. Right from the start, he describes a macroscopic topic, but does so through the lens of his own personal experience and cultural values.
2. Thesis Statement: His introduction concludes with a solid “Sentence of Purpose” that focuses on the elderly in one specific country. Note that it’s not particularly detailed, but after such a great introduction/frame narrative, it works:

“Therein lies my desire to study in the Biostatistics program in the Gotham University School of Public Health. I hope to play a role in analyzing the complex health issues my country faces, to better support public initiatives to treat our aging population.”

1. Turn a Weakness Into a Strength: In paragraph 4, Yichen says honestly that he doesn’t have a strong Public Health background. But that’s no problem! By highlighting exactly which university resources will fill his knowledge gaps, he shows that he’s already got a thorough plan to succeed. This gives us serious confidence in him.
2. Affinity with a Target Professor: In the next-to-last paragraph, Yichen discusses a specific professor whose research he wants to model in the future. He doesn’t go into excessive detail. He just describes her work with confidence (highlighting a few pertinent methodologies) and states how this ties into his own career goals.
3. Specific Goals: There is nothing “general” about this applicant’s goals. He doesn’t just want to work in public health and save the world. He knows exactly which niche he wants to work in, and he gives us the sense that he’s considered his future deeply and envisioned it in granular detail:

“My long-term goal is to participate in research on genetics and disease in either orthopedic hospitals or the pharmaceutical industry. I am deeply interested in applying data analysis and modeling to the field of bone health, and hope to participate in research on prevention of long-term disease and occupational health issues.”

What’s Odd About This SOP

If you haven’t noticed already, this essay doesn’t entirely follow the structure I advise in the SOP Starter Kit. It does use a great Frame Narrative Introduction, and closes that narrative in the Conclusion. Yet the middle sections – Why This Program and Why I’m Qualified – are interwoven.

I don’t advise other students do this. It’s hard to pull off, and following the structure in the Starter Kit will be far easier, and equally persuasive. Yet, for Yichen, it worked. He’s a natural writer, and after many drafts, he embedded a smart logical flow throughout his paragraphs. If we outline the transition sentences, we can see how that logic plays out:

1. I’m ready for this program because I am strong in applied math;
2. But, curiously, I’m weak in public health;
3. Fortunately, I’ve explored your coursework and found these uniquely perfect solutions;
4. I can succeed in these classes because my past research has prepared me well;
5. Finally, my long-term goals lie in a specific kind of research;
6. So, working with this specific professor at your university will be the perfect preparation.

What You Can Learn

When drafting essays, many students just…word vomit. They stuff in all the information they can think of, especially in the Why I’m Qualified section where they tend to repeat items from their CV. They don’t contextualize. They don’t view their essay as an argument. They write to inform, and not to persuade.

Because of his weak public health background, Yichen knew he needed to make an argument.

As you draft your MPH statement of purpose, I suggest you extract the transition sentences between each paragraph. Put them in an outline, and see if it makes sense. If it feels clunky, then you aren’t really making an argument. Revise them until you’re certain the essay flows logically from sentence-to-sentence, and paragraph-to-paragraph.

Even though SOPs are a kind of hybrid creative/persuasive essay form, they still use the timeless lessons of structure that you learned in Freshman Comp 101:

1. Introduction/topic sentence
2. Evidence
3. Conclusion

The topic and conclusion sentences of each paragraph slot together. They weave a “golden thread” of logic throughout the whole essay. For the reader, it’s like floating on a boat down a gentle river. They don’t have to paddle furiously to get to the end. The current just carries them along.

Give your reader a gentle logical river to float down. Trust me, they’ll appreciate it. And it will make you look like a rock star.

Conclusion

I’m thankful to Yichen for allowing me to post this sample essay. He put in the hard work, and he was rewarded for it with admission to his #1 target school, a top-10 MPH program. Learn from his example:

1. Contemplate big, humanistic research questions in your essay. Figure out WHY you’re really doing all this, and what difference you can make in the world.
2. Use a personalized introduction, but don’t be gimmicky or juvenile. Be professional, straightforward, mature, unemotional, and completely non-melodramatic.
3. Turn your weakness into strengths.
4. Present a logical argument that weaves through every sentence and paragraph of your essay. (The SOP Starter Kit will help!)

Want to write an MPH statement of purpose that stands out? Let me help!

How are you going to structure your essay to make it insanely persuasive?