How to Write an About Me Page That Doesn't Feel Awkward

Writing about yourself is the hardest part of building a personal website — everyone feels it. Too modest and you undersell; too bold and it reads as bragging; play it safe and you end up with the same "passionate professional" paragraph as everyone else.

The fix is structure. An About page isn't a personality test; it's a short document with a known job. Here's the structure, the length, and worked examples you can adapt.

What an About page is actually for

By the time someone clicks "About," they already know your name and role — the homepage told them. They're clicking to answer softer questions: What's this person actually good at? What are they like? Do I want to talk to them?

So the page has three jobs:

1. Sharpen what you do — beyond the job title.
2. Prove it — with one or two specifics.
3. Point forward — what you want next, so the right people know to reach out.

Everything else is optional garnish.

The four-sentence skeleton

If you write nothing else, write these four sentences:

1. What you do now. Role, specialty, and the kind of problems you work on.
2. What you're best at. The thing colleagues come to you for — as concrete as you can make it.
3. Proof. One achievement with a number or a nameable outcome.
4. What's next. The work, team, or problem you're looking for.

Example, filled in:

I'm a backend engineer who works on payment systems — the unglamorous plumbing that has to be right. My specialty is making slow things fast: at Parcel, I cut checkout API latency from 900ms to 210ms, which support tickets noticed before the dashboards did. Outside work I maintain a small open-source rate-limiting library. I'm looking for a senior role on a team where reliability is a feature, not an afterthought.

Four sentences plus one personal note. That's a complete About section — and it's better than 90% of what's out there.

Expanding it (when you have more to say)

The skeleton scales up cleanly. Keep the same order, give each beat a short paragraph instead of a sentence:

• Paragraph 1 — now: your role and the through-line of your work. If your path had a turn ("lawyer turned product manager"), name it here; a turn is a story, and stories are memorable.
• Paragraph 2 — proof: two or three highlights. Numbers where you have them; consequences where you don't ("the template system my team still uses").
• Paragraph 3 — texture: one or two genuinely specific personal details. Specific is the test — "I've run a marathon on every continent except Antarctica" earns its place; "I enjoy traveling" doesn't. (More on that line in what not to put on a personal website.)
• Paragraph 4 — forward: what you want next, plus how to reach you.

Hard ceiling: 300 words. Past that, you're writing for yourself, not the reader.

Three worked examples

The career changer

After six years in commercial kitchens — the last two running a line of twelve — I retrained as a UX researcher, and it turns out the jobs are the same: watch people under pressure, find where the system fails them, fix it. Since switching, I've run 40+ usability studies at two startups, including the research that led Basil to rebuild its onboarding and double activation. I'm looking for a research role on a product where the stakes for real users are high.

Why it works: the turn is the hook, and the old career is framed as evidence, not apology.

The new grad

I'm a recent CS grad who likes the parts of software that touch people — I spent my degree gravitating toward accessibility and front-of-the-frontend work. My capstone project, a screen-reader-first recipe app, is the thing I'm proudest of: built with two classmates, tested with actual blind users, and genuinely usable. I'm looking for a junior frontend role on a team that takes accessibility seriously enough to argue about it.

Why it works: no work history needed — one real project with real users carries the whole page.

The senior specialist

I've spent twelve years doing one thing: making data teams useful to the rest of the company. As the first data hire at three companies, I've built the stack, hired the team, and — the hard part — gotten sales and product to actually trust the numbers. Most recently at Fathom, the metrics layer my team built became the company's single source of truth for board reporting. I write occasionally about data team dysfunction, and I'm open to fractional and advisory work.

Why it works: repetition as depth ("one thing, twelve years"), and the proof is organizational, not just technical.

Voice: three small rules

• First person, always. "I build" — not "Maya builds" (distant) and not "we" (confusing on a personal site).
• Write like you talk, then tighten. Read it aloud; anything you'd never say out loud gets rewritten. This kills "synergize" on contact.
• Claims get evidence or get cut. Every adjective about yourself should have a fact within one sentence of it.

Common questions

Should the About section live on the homepage or its own page?

Under ~150 words, put it on the homepage — most visitors never click through to subpages. If you have the full four-paragraph version, homepage gets the short version, About page gets the long one. See what to put on a personal website for how it fits the overall page order.

Photo or no photo?

A photo builds trust and makes you memorable; use one if you're at all comfortable. Clean light, plain background, looks-like-you. Skip the crossed-arms LinkedIn pose if it doesn't feel like you.

What if I genuinely can't write about myself?

You're the norm, not the exception. Two tricks: write it in the third person first, then convert the pronouns — distance makes honesty easier. Or start from your resume: Unfold drafts your About section (and the rest of the site) from your resume PDF, which gives you something concrete to edit instead of a blank page. Editing "almost right" into "right" is a much easier problem than starting cold. Here's how that works.