Most college students would encounter multiple situations during their lifetime when they would reveal certain aspects of their inner selves upon a request. Hence, learning how to write about yourself is an important skill that needs to be mastered in order to meet these challenges.
How to Write a Perfect About Me Page (With Examples)
Alison Doyle is one of the nation’s foremost career experts and has counseled both students and corporations on hiring practices. She has given hundreds of interviews on the topic for outlets including The New York Times, BBC News, and LinkedIn. Alison founded CareerToolBelt.com and has been an expert in the field for more than 20 years.
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An ’About Me’ page is one of the most important parts of your portfolio, website, or blog. This page is where prospective employers, potential clients, website users, and other professional and personal connections go to learn about who you are and what you do. And it’s an ideal resource for promoting your professional brand.
It can be challenging to write about yourself. However, the good news is if you follow the formula and tips below, you should be able to generate an engaging ‘About Me’ statement without too much of a struggle.
Why Create an ‘About Me’ Page
Your ‘About Me’ page should convey:
Use this space to describe your credentials, expertise, and goals. What’s the best way to start? The following exercises can be helpful in figuring all of that out, and will help you determine what to include based on your target audience.
1. What are you currently doing (in regard to your career) and how did you get there?
Madison Blackstone is a director of brand marketing, with experience managing global teams and multi-million-dollar campaigns. Her background in brand strategy, visual design, and account management inform her mindful but competitive approach.
2. In terms of the work you do, what aspects are you most passionate about and why?
Madison is fueled by her passion for understanding the nuances of cross-cultural advertising. She considers herself a ‘forever student,’ eager to both build on her academic foundations in psychology and sociology and stay in tune with the latest digital marketing strategies through continued coursework and professional development.
3. What do you consider some of your biggest professional and personal accomplishments?
Madison’s hunger for knowledge and determination to turn information into action has contributed to her most recent success at Rockwell Group. There, she led international award-winning campaigns for heavy-hitting brands such as Puma, Gucci, and Rolex.
Meanwhile, she vastly improved the productivity of her department by implementing strategic project management methods and ensuring a work-life balance for her team. Madison believes mindfulness in the workplace is key to success, a tenet she lives out through her interests in yoga, meditation, gardening, and painting.
4. What are you looking for right now?
Once you’ve completed the exercises above, you’ll have some material to work into your ‘About Me’ page. Ideally, each answer should flow into the next. Again, you want the finished product to convey who you are and what you’re doing, how you got there, and where you’re looking to go next.
Why It Is Important Knowing How to Write About Yourself
Knowing how to write an essay about yourself is essential for many grounds. Some of the most common situations when people would need this is for professional reasons – to describe themselves to an employer or an academic institution for admission. While your biography or previous performance record normally have a huge weight in evaluating your candidacy, there are some aspects that may only be conveyed by you personally in a clearly-formulated, well-structured, efficient essay or block of text.
Among the personal information for which a self-description is indispensable are your purposes, life goals, long-term career vision, primary motivation, concerns, personal challenges envisioned, honest assessment of your personal strengths and weaknesses. Writing such papers openly is an important self-analysis tool – it is not a coincidence that many psychologists use this technique for gaining better understanding of themselves or for fighting stress.
How to Start an Essay About Yourself & How to Structure It
Like many other essay types, this one would also have an introduction, body, conclusion. Introductory part may vary a lot depending on the scope of the essay. To capture attention, it could start with describing a life event or story defining your life/ personality, a certain belief or state of mind characterizing you. It could start with some basic notes on your biography or could provide some important context describing where you are now in life. You could share a personal vision, dream, life credo and efforts of pursuing it.
Main body would contain a deeper exploration/ dissection of the traits mentioned with more factual details and real-life examples confirming them. One could mention and explain which challenges, experience, background exactly led to the evolution of these traits.
If this essay is part of professional or academic competition, the story should explore/ tell how your experience, interests, achievements, developed competencies, and personal traits qualify you for a given position and how obtaining this position is in line with your aspirations and goals.
In this kind of writing, it is particularly important making the conclusion strong and memorable. The conclusion should restate the idea, perhaps, less directly, that all your life and professional experience make you a good match for the targeted position but it should do much more than this, for instance, mention some relevant open questions regarding one’s biography, mention a long-sought dream that could be fulfilled, offer prophetic vision about one’s own future, short mention of one’s meaning of life and potentially, how it relates to current goals, very brief distilled overview of one’s entire past along with some interpreting remarks, especially, in case of an autobiography.
Dig For Details
When I was a kid, my father explained the impact of a vividly evoked memory by quoting Firesign Theater: “Then it all came rushing back to me, like the hot kiss at the end of a wet fist.” Thirty years later, I remember that quote. Details have an impact; generalities don’t.
It is of paramount importance to be specific and creative and choose the right details. Not all details are useful. Some are distracting. Some might be offensive. Some are mundane. The right information provokes a reader to react, not just generally but in the way the author intended.
For example, as a legal aid lawyer, I applied for many program grants. I learned that it was ineffective to write, “Our program has provided legal representation to 243 demographically diverse victims of domestic violence in family law cases.”
On the other hand, it was effective to write something like, “Louise became a client of our program at age seventy-eight when she sought help in divorcing her abusive husband the day after her first great-grandson was born.” Both statements were factual, but only one used detail to enable the reader to understand that truth at a gut level, and so only one brought in grant money.
Examples of Writing About Yourself
Even if you feel super confident about writing about yourself now, we wanted to provide a few short examples to help you get started. Your tone, word choice, and more may differ depending on which piece you’re working on.
Those were probably the best and the worst days of my life. I had never felt more happy and never felt more sad. I felt as though I were so close to having everything I had ever wanted, yet it seemed with every step forward, I had to take two steps back. It was exhausting. How did I get through it? To be quite honest, I have no damn idea.
Perspective helped. I knew I could have had it way worse; I knew that my struggle wasn’t unique. I knew, too, that even when the small wins would come they’d have yet another loss right on their tails. I paid dearly for having too much heart and optimism, so I regularly had to hose myself down with logic and pessimism.
If you’re reading this, it’s too late. Just kidding! That’s just a really good Drake album. I wanted to take some time to talk about what’s been going on in my life lately for those of you who are nosey enough to care. Again, kidding, I know some of you really care. I’m so grateful to have even this small following that I have. It’s wild, really. Who would have thought that people want to know what’s going on in my head at any given time? Joke’s on you guys, though, because I don’t fully know all the time.
I guess I’ll start off by saying that work has been a whirlwind. As you all know, it isn’t an easy time for anyone, so please don’t take this declaration as a complaint. I’m thrilled to still have a job despite everything going on. However, leaving this reflection at just that would be doing both myself and you all a disservice. It’s weak. It doesn’t really describe what’s been going on. Allow me to continue.
When I was young, my grandmother told me I couldn’t please everyone — that some people just wouldn’t like me for no reason at all. This was very hard for me to swallow at times. What does this have to do with who I am today and why I plan to attend your university?
Well, this early lesson demonstrates that in order for this world to keep spinning, we all have to be unwavering in our own pursuits. We are ourselves. We can’t be anyone else. In that, we all have the responsibility to bring our unique talents, wisdom, and heart to the table — even when we’re seated across from people who may not like us.
References:
https://www.thebalancecareers.com/how-to-write-about-me-page-examples-4142367
https://edubirdie.com/blog/how-to-write-about-yourself
https://becomeawritertoday.com/how-to-write-about-yourself/
https://www.joincake.com/blog/how-to-write-about-yourself/