Writing your autobiography

Your autobiography cannot cover every single thing that has ever happened to you.
What that means is that the first step of writing this kind of essay is deciding what the
most important details of your life are. What factors, both bad and good, have shaped
you into the person you are today.

To help you get started with that, take a piece of paper and list some most important
things you’ve experienced so far. It may be the day you were born, how many children
there are in your family, a family member’s death and the impact it had on your
circumstances… List as many factual things about you that have had a bearing on you
and how your life has gone.

Then in chronological order, detail each of those events and their impact. This essay
does not have to be creatively written, it just needs to communicate the important things
about you to give context about who you are to the admissions officer. So if you don’t
have any extracurricular activities because every day after school you have to go to the
market to assist your mother, it’ll make sense and let the admissions officer know you
are not lazy, just living with different circumstances.

So is your autobiography your personal statement? Not at all. We will put your
autobiography under “Additional information”. The personal statement is an opportunity
to be witty, clever, poetic: to just be yourself, however you define that. Writing your
autobiography first will free you to think of other topics and other things that are
important to you but that don’t necessarily have to do with the external circumstances of
your life.

Take two or three hours to do this. Don’t overthink it. Please submit your autobiography
essay to me by the end of day on April 1 2020.