I would use the geometry package to establish the desired margins. To get the margins in your sample document, try:

usepackage[left=1in,right=1in,top=1in,bottom=1in]{geometry}

Your next requirement was to fix the title block. LaTeX uses the internal command @maketitle to format the title block. You can redefine this as you like. To achieve the same title block style as in the sample document, use:

usepackage[svgnames]{xcolor}% provides colors for text
makeatletter% since there s an at-sign (@) in the command name

enewcommand{@maketitle}{%
  egin{center}
    parskipaselineskip% skip a line between paragraphs in the title block
    parindent=0pt% don t indent paragraphs in the title block
    	extcolor{red}{f@title}par
    	extbf{@author}par
    %@date% remove the percent sign at the beginning of this line if you want the date printed
  end{center}
}
makeatother% resets the meaning of the at-sign (@)

The @title, @author, and @date commands will print the title, author, and date. You can use whatever formatting commands you like to set the text in bold, different colors, etc.

Put all of the above commands in the preamble of the document. The preamble is the space between documentclass and egin{document}.

documentclass{article}

% this is the preamble
% put all of the above code in here

	itle{Personal Statement}
author{Tim}

egin{document}

maketitle% prints the title block

Emergency medicine has always been a passion of mineldots

end{document}

Attempt #1: I ve used the following style file, which I call cramp2e, for similar purposes. It is probably not right for you, but have a look:

oddsidemargin -1cm 
evensidemargin -2cm 
	opmargin 1cm    
	extheight 24cm
	extwidth 19cm
headheight 0cm
headsep .7cm
footskip .7cm
parskip .2cm
paperheight 25cm
setlengthvoffset{-.33in}
setlengthhoffset{-.25in}

Any good?

Postscript This is for A4 size paper.

A slightly less LaTeX-ey solution would be to not use the maketitle command. A couple of times I ve simply used this as my title(marginsize helps too).

Set up smaller margins:

documentclass{article}
usepackage{anysize}
marginsize{1cm}{1cm}{1cm}{1cm}

(EDIT: 1cm might be even better..) Minimal title:

egin{document}
egin{center}
section*{My Document Title}
	oday
end{center}

% content goes here

end{document}

The result looks something like: