How to Make Your University of Chicago MSW Candidate Statement Stand Out
If you’re applying to the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice’s Master of Social Work program, and you’re not sure where to start with writing the Candidate Statement (their equivalent of a personal statement) or are struggling to get it finished, this guide is for you!
In this guide, I’ll break down:
What they are really looking for
The difference between the two prompts
How to approach each prompt strategically
Common mistakes applicants make
Tips to help your Candidate Statement stand out
Note: I am not affiliated with the University of Chicago, and everything in this post is based on my experience supporting MSW applicants and analyzing Crown’s stated values, curriculum, and admissions priorities. Always defer to the school’s website for the most up-to-date application information.
What is the University of Chicago’s MSW Candidate Statement?
Crown requires a Candidate Statement that’s three to four double-spaced pages, addressing two prompts, each roughly one and a half to two pages each.
The Candidate Statement helps the admissions committee assess:
Your motivation for pursuing social work
Your career goals and interests
Your alignment with the Crown’s mission and values
Your ability to think critically and write at a graduate level
A strong Candidate Statement will:
Explain why you want to pursue your AM (MSW equivalent) at Crown
Draw clear connections between past experiences and future goals
Demonstrate effective, reflective written communication
Before You Start Writing
To write an outstanding Candidate Statement, you need to speak Crown’s language. While you want your goals and writing to be authentic to you, you also need to show a strong fit with Crown’s orientation, mission, and values. This means you need to understand what makes their program different from other MSW programs, so do a bit of research on their website before you start writing.
Here are two things that stand out to me:
1) A Broader, Integrative, and Interdisciplinary Focus
Crown awards an AM (Artium Magister, or Master of Arts), not an MSW, which reflects a broader, interdisciplinary, and theory-informed approach. The program combines social work with policy analysis, research, social administration, and social science theory, providing a broader foundation for leadership roles across micro, mezzo, and macro levels. Even if your focus is clinical, Crown expects you to show awareness of how larger systems affect practice.
Strategic Takeaway: If you’re interested in therapy, don’t just discuss helping individuals. Explain your desire to understand the policies, systems, structures, and community or cultural contexts that affect those individuals’ well-being. Crown values applicants who see the connections between micro, mezzo, and macro work.
2) The Five “Integrated Pathways
Crown currently has Five Integrated Pathways:
Transforming Justice & Violence Prevention
Integrating Health, Mental Health & Social Care
Disrupting Poverty, Economic Inequality & Social Exclusion
Children and Families in System Contexts
Global Health & Social Development
Strategic Takeaway: In your statement, reference the pathway that aligns with your interests to demonstrate your fit with the program – but don’t just name it. Show how your experiences (e.g., academic, volunteer, work, or lived experiences) and career goals connect to that pathway’s focus. For instance, if you’ve worked in the youth justice space, connect that and your career goals directly to the “Transforming Justice & Violence Prevention” pathway.
Candidate Statement Prompts
Crown provides two main prompts. Let’s unpack them and look at how to approach each strategically.
Prompt 1:
Students graduating from the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice pursue careers and assume leadership roles in diverse areas across a range of social sectors (e.g., child and family welfare, health, mental health, education, housing, violence prevention, criminal justice, etc.) that cross individual, family, community, management, and policy levels, both domestically and globally. Please tell us:
What inspires your decision to pursue a degree at the Crown Family School
The type of work you hope to pursue
How an education at the Crown Family School will help you pursue your passions and achieve your career goals
What Crown is Actually Asking
This prompt centers on fit, motivation, and direction. Crown wants to see if you have clarity about your professional path and how their graduate education specifically fits into it.
Think of it as answering three questions:
Why are you pursuing an MSW at this point in your life? (What experiences or insights led you here?)
What kind of work do you hope to pursue after graduation? (e.g., population, sector, level of practice, area of focus, specific goals)
Why is the Crown Family School the right place for that path? (What does Crown specifically offer that aligns with your goals?)
Pro Tip: Even if your path is clinically oriented, tie your interests to systems-level understanding, showing curiosity about context, policy, and power. For example, “I hope to become a Licensed Clinical Social Worker who not only provides trauma-informed care but also works to address structural barriers that exacerbate trauma in under-resourced communities.”
A Helpful Outline for Prompt 1
What sparked your decision to pursue social work (grounded in personal/professional experiences and/or career goals)
The kind of work you aim to do after graduation (e.g., population, sector, level of practice, area of focus, specific goals)
Why Crown’s approach, curriculum, orientation, and other unique features (e.g., faculty, practicum opportunities, etc.) are the right fit for your aspirations
Your final version can expand beyond these, but this suggested structure is a good starting point that will ensure you answer all parts of the prompt.
Prompt 2:
Please discuss how your core values and the sense of purpose motivating your career plans align with the Crown Family School's mission, values, and guiding principles as you understand them.
In your answer, describe how your personal and/or professional experiences have shaped your commitment to the broader field of social work and might inform your work as a student, professional, and future leader in your chosen field.
What Crown is Actually Asking
At first glance, this seems similar to Prompt 1, but it digs deeper. It’s less about your goals and more about your values, identity, and approach as a future social work student and practitioner.
What values guide your commitment to social work? What do you stand for, personally and professionally?
How do those values align with Crown’s mission and guiding principles? Where do your commitments overlap with how Crown approaches social work?
How have your experiences shaped these values and commitments? What have you learned through personal and/or professional experiences? What about your social location (e.g., race, class, gender, ability, immigration status, educational background, etc.)?
How will they inform the way you show up as a student and professional? How do these values, experiences, and/or identities translate into action?
This prompt is not asking you to restate Crown’s mission. It is asking you to show how your experiences have shaped the way you think, reflect, and will act as a future social work student and practitioner.
For instance, “Working with unhoused families at [organization] taught me how punitive shelter policies can retraumatize the very people they claim to serve… This realization strengthened my commitment to Crown’s emphasis on examining how systems perpetuate harm, not just treating its symptoms.”
You can also examine your social location.
Crown emphasizes the person-in-environment perspective and understanding how power structures affect people. If you can critically reflect on your own identities and how they’ve shaped your worldview and approach to social work, that demonstrates important self-awareness.
This might look like, “As a first-generation college student from a working-class background, I intimately understand the isolation of navigating unfamiliar systems without a roadmap, which drives my commitment to making mental health services more accessible and less intimidating for marginalized communities.”
Or “As a white professional working in predominantly Black and Brown communities, I have had to continually examine how my privilege shapes my assumptions about resilience, family structure, and what ‘help’ should look like, deepening my commitment to cultural humility and anti-oppressive practice.”
You don’t need to discuss every aspect of your identity, and you shouldn’t force this if it doesn’t feel authentic or safe, but if certain aspects of your social location have meaningfully shaped how you understand power, systems, or your role as a social worker, Prompt 2 is an ideal place to explore that.
A Helpful Outline for Prompt 2
Introduce your core values.
Reflect on key experiences that developed or challenged those values.
Connect those values directly to Crown’s mission or approach (e.g., “Crown’s emphasis on integrating policy and practice reflects my belief that systemic and interpersonal change must be linked…”).
Conclude with how you will embody these commitments as a student and practitioner.
Pro Tip: Use reflective moments instead of resume points. You want to avoid having this section sound like a resume in essay format and instead use reflective stories that show your values in action. Instead of “I volunteered at a crisis hotline for two years, where I answered calls and provided resources to callers in distress,” try “While volunteering at the crisis hotline, one caller taught me that sometimes helping means sitting with someone’s pain and listening rather than rushing to fix it, which fundamentally changed how I understand the social worker’s role.”
Common Mistakes to Avoid
As you draft your Candidate Statement, watch out for these pitfalls that can weaken an otherwise strong application:
Being too vague about your goals. Saying you want to “help people,” “make a difference,” or “become a Licensed Clinical Social Worker” doesn’t distinguish you from other applicants. Crown wants specificity. What population? What area of focus? What approach? Instead of “I want to work with marginalized populations,” try, “I want to provide trauma-informed therapy to immigrant youth while advocating for more culturally responsive mental health services in school systems.”
Treating this like two separate essays. While the prompts are distinct, they should work together to tell a cohesive story. Your values in Prompt 2 should naturally connect to the motivations and goals you discuss in Prompt 1. For example, if you mention a commitment to health equity in Prompt 2, that should align with your stated career goals in Prompt 1.
Simply listing Crown’s features without explaining why they matter to you. Don’t just say, “I’m drawn to Crown’s integrative approach” or “I am excited to learn from faculty members, such as Professor X.” Explain why that matters for your specific path. For instance, “Crown’s integrative curriculum will allow me to combine clinical training with policy analysis, preparing me to address both the individual and systemic factors contributing to housing insecurity among transition-age youth.”
Forgetting to show, not just tell. Rather than stating, “I am passionate about social justice,” describe a moment that revealed an injustice to you and how it shaped your perspective and approach. Use specific examples and reflective analysis to demonstrate your values rather than simply declaring them.
Overlooking the “leadership” aspect. Crown explicitly mentions that graduates “assume leadership roles.” Even if you don’t aspire to be an Executive Director or in a formal leadership role, show how you think about leading change in your future work, whether that’s clinical leadership, community organizing, research, or advocacy.
Final Tips to Make Your Statement Stand Out
Do your homework on Crown’s faculty, research centers, global learning opportunities, and unique electives. Mentioning specific faculty members whose work aligns with your interests, a specific research center, their global learning opportunities, specific electives they offer, and other unique aspects of their program can help demonstrate fit. Just make sure you explain the connection to make these references meaningful and not superficial name-drops. For more inspiration on how to demonstrate program fit, check out our guide to answering “Why are you a good fit for this program?”
Connect lived experience to professional insight when relevant. If personal experiences inform your commitment to social work, it’s powerful to include them, but focus on what you learned and how it shaped your professional perspective. The emphasis should be on insight gained, not just the experience itself. For more on the “fine line” of sharing your personal story, read our post on Can (And Should) You Discuss Personal Experiences in Your Personal Statement.
Use the language of social work thoughtfully. Incorporate relevant terminology like “strengths-based approach,” “person-in-environment,” “structural inequities,” “trauma-informed care,” “cultural humility,” or “anti-oppressive practice” where appropriate, but only if you understand these concepts and can apply them meaningfully to your experiences and goals. To help build your social work vocabulary, check out our Social Work Buzzwords Checklist and our post on Using Social Work Theories in Your MSW Personal Statement.
Make every sentence earn its place. With only three to four double-spaced pages total, you don’t have room for filler. Each paragraph and sentence should advance your narrative, reveal something meaningful about your values or experiences, or demonstrate your fit with Crown’s program. Cut anything that’s generic or repetitive, and check out our post on Meeting and Staying Within the Word Count for additional support.
Consider using APA formatting. Since the school requests a standard essay format, I would consider using APA formatting with headings that align with the prompts so that your Candidate Statement is easy for admissions reviewers to scan. We have a guide on APA formatting your statement, including a free downloadable APA style personal statement template.
End Strong. Your conclusion should leave the admissions committee with a clear sense of who you are, what you value, and how you’ll contribute to Crown’s community. Consider closing with a forward-looking statement that connects your past experiences, present motivations, and future goals in a way that is specific and unique to you.
Get feedback, then revise. Multiple rounds of revision are normal and necessary for a strong statement. Here are the most common grammar errors we see and how to fix them to get you started.
Key Takeaways
Writing a strong Candidate Statement for the University of Chicago Crown Family School takes time, reflection, and strategic thinking. But if you’ve made it this far in the application process, you already have the experiences, values, and commitment that Crown is looking for. All you need to do is communicate them effectively.
Remember these key takeaways as you write:
Specificity is your friend. Vague statements about “always wanting to help people” won’t help you stand out. Ground your motivations in concrete experiences and articulate clear, specific career goals that connect to Crown’s pathways and approach.
Show the connections. Crown values applicants who understand how micro, mezzo, and macro practice intersect. Whether you’re clinically focused or drawn to policy work, demonstrate awareness of how systems, structures, and individual experiences shape one another.
Reflect, don’t just report. Your statement should reveal not just what you’ve done, but what you’ve learned, how you’ve grown, and how those insights will inform your approach as a student and practitioner.
Make it unmistakably yours. Crown receives hundreds of applications from qualified candidates. What will make yours stand out is authenticity and leaning into what makes you different, such as your unique perspective, your genuine voice, and your specific vision for how you’ll contribute to the field of social work.
Looking for more support?
If you want to ensure your Candidate Statement is as polished and persuasive as possible, we can help. Learn more about our services here.
