Can I reuse part of an essay for an application to a different program at the same school

Question

Asking for a(n international) friend. She has gotten into and is weeks away from completing her masters at a public university in the US (California). She is now applying to PhD programs and wondering if it is acceptable to reuse part of her personal statement and statement of purpose that she wrote to get accepted into the masters program for her PhD application at the same institution. Obviously, she would not use the whole thing, as she has work and experience from her masters to talk about, but certain parts are still entirely true and are already well written.

Would this count as plagiarism or otherwise be inadvisable?

Answer 1

I don't see the issue here. These statements are about herself. If she and her goals haven't changed much, of course parts of these statements would stay the same or even identical.

At most, this could be "self-plagiarism", i.e., reusing your own texts, which strictly speaking isn't even plagiarism, i.e., representing the ideas of others as your own. "Self-plagiarism" is not allowed in scientific publishing and in student assignments. But I find the notion of even checking for this in applications ridiculous. Many people reuse their entire application package for different positions. That might not land them the position (because it isn't tailored sufficiently to the position) but I've never heard of this being considered not acceptable.