Some students decide to start their statements start with quips, jokes, quotes or funny one-liners. This sometimes catches the attention of the admission tutors but be careful because it often dos not work as admission tutors think that you are using the easy way out rather than using the space to write something about yourself, which is naturally eye-catching and intriguing without the help of a joke. The best idea for writing your personal statement is to write what is true and what comes naturally to you. You should keep the tone of your statement formal but not too formal because you still want your personality to shine through. You should look at each sentence individually to ensure that it brings a good, strong point to your statement.
Exam Tips: UCAS: Your Personal Statement from Leaving School
For many people applying to university through the UCAS system is a very stressful process, and the worst part of it is trying to come up with a good personal statement to make you stand out from the crowd. It is a common experience to sit staring at a blank Word document at some point in your life, racking your brains for something novel to say about yourself. I wish I could say “Don’t worry, it’s not that important!” but it is.
With many courses – especially in the Arts & Humanities – experiencing large cuts in central government funding, admissions tutors are turning more to applicants’ personal statements to determine which candidates will earn a place. Furthermore, considering that the great number of universities outside of Oxford and Cambridge do not conduct interviews with applicants, a good personal statement can be your chance to impress a piece of your personality upon the admissions tutor.
When it comes to preparing your UCAS form and deciding how to write your UCAS personal statement, you need to put yourself for a moment in the place of the admissions tutor who will be looking at your form. With more and more people applying for university places it is quite possible that the admissions tutor may have a pile of 500 application forms on his or her desk, and that the amount of time the tutor can spend considering your form is very limited. You must remember too that the first thing that will win you a place on the degree course of your choice will be your exam performance, either your actual results or the grades your teachers can predict for you. This means that a good deal of realism in your thinking is necessary when you make your application. If the guidelines for a course you are interested in are that you will have to have three As at A2, and your predictions are three Cs, then obviously it is not worth wasting your energy making an application which is unlikely to succeed.
But if your academic prospects or results are good enough for the chosen course, then the quality and content of your UCAS personal statement becomes very important. It is the part of the form many students feel least confident about, but there are some guidelines which might make the process easier for you, or at least give you a possible approach. However, the clear importance of a good personal statement need not make the writing of it too stressful – indeed some A-level students may take solace in the fact that a very important determinant of whether they get onto their desired course is not strictly reliant on academic achievement!
On the other hand, some students (especially those taking mainly science related A-levels) will not have been required to do any creative writing for years and could consequently find the writing process challenging. Either way, writing a good person statement will take lots and lots of redrafting, and should you be especially set on one particular university then it is also a good idea to craft your personal statement to suit this institution – although this can be potentially risky if it backfires.
This video from the Imperial College London gives you a great introduction to Personal Statements and why they’re so important. It’s a little bit longer than some others but very, very helpful:
UCAS applications can be a nightmare with thousands upon thousands of students trying to apply for courses at their dream universities. Once they have trawled through countless universities, discounting hundreds and falling in love with five, students then have the difficult application process to follow through.
In this application process is the personal statement. The UCAS criterion is difficult and specific but very hard to explain as one admission tutor may have a slightly different view from another. What is for sure is that you should ensure that you write a detailed explanation about why you are applying for your chosen course and why you are suitable for this course. Make sure you sell yourself and do not forget to mention any work experience, hobbies or personal attributes that show how suited you are to the course.
It is important to think about why you want to study this course and why you are applying for university in the first place. You then need to write this down succinctly. It may be to progress your career and broaden your horizons, for example.
Admission tutors like to see real enthusiasm in your application. They are highly interested in seeing how much you want to go to university and how you will appreciate it when you are there. Express specific motivation for your application and explain thoroughly why in particular you have chosen the course you are applying for.
Demonstrate Enthusiasm for the Course
Your UCAS personal statement must show that you know something about the subject you are applying to study at university. This may sound obvious, but the most common failing in personal statements is the inadequacy in this area. The admissions tutor is looking for people who are going to do well on his or her course and respond positively to the subject they are studying, so he wants to see in your UCAS personal statement that you really know something about the material in the course and that it really interests you. Of course the admissions tutor does not expect you to know very much at this stage, but he wants to be able to see evidence of your genuine curiosity about the subject.
If you are applying to do English, then, in your UCAS personal statement you should try to show what you have read recently and which authors have impressed you most and why. You might say something like “I particularly enjoy the 19th century novel because of its psychological realism and depth, and I am very interested in the way that novelists at the beginning of the 20th century clearly felt that they could not write like that any more and needed to experiment with techniques and forms.” Perhaps you might say “It is Shakespeare’s presentation of evil characters I find most interesting, particularly as his ideas seem so different from our own.”
The History student can use his A-level courses to show his or her interest. He or she might say in the UCAS personal statement “I was particularly interested in the reign of George III, especially in the British reactions to the French Revolution, both among the intellectuals of the time and the ordinary people” or “the great interest in the Napoleonic era for me is in the way it prefigures so much of twentieth century European history, both before and after 1945”.
The engineer might write about machine design, e-manufacturing, advanced manufacturing technology and the analysis of engineering failure. The politics student should show an interest in the key concepts in political theory – the state, democracy, national identity, the extent of rights, the concept of freedom as well as the ideologies of right and left. The would-be pharmacist needs to show in the UCAS personal statement an interest in the science of the formulation of medicines, as well as a knowledge of cell and molecular biology, systemic physiology, the associated disease pathology and the pharmacology of appropriate drugs.
Whatever your subject you must do some research to be able to show that you know what you are letting yourself in for in applying to do a three-year degree course, and your UCAS personal statement is the one chance you have to show that knowledge. You can show your enthusiasm within your application by talking about future plans and goals and how you see your university achievements benefiting your career plans.
Beyond Academic Achievements
Admissions tutors will see your grades and predicted A-level grades on your application but they want to see what sets you apart from all of the other applicants so you need to detail this very obviously in your personal statement. In your UCAS personal statement part of the information you provide about yourself will be the sort of achievements and experiences you have had which might be relevant to your application. You will only need to mention non-examination successes and the like in this part of your personal statement. Proportion is needed here. The admissions tutor reading your personal statement will not be very interested in your sporting achievements – unless of course you are applying to study sports science or the like. Don’t fill up half of you UCAS personal statement with details of which netball team you have played in. If you have room, it might be worth mentioning that you have represented your school at various games, but a sentence is enough, unless you have captained a team and want to make a point about your leadership skills. You must consider carefully, though, whether this is of any significance to the course you are applying for. If you are applying to study business management, then ability to lead and guide people might be relevant. If it’s English or Physics, say, then it is of no importance at all.
Some achievements might suggest that you have the powers of perseverance which are important in a candidate for a long and challenging course. D of E, particularly Gold Award, is worth mentioning, as is BSES, which involves raising a substantial amount of money first and then living for six weeks in primitive conditions in the Arctic or in darkest Africa. Any long-term voluntary work is something worth boasting about. Courses relevant to your subject should be mentioned if they show a dedication to that subject beyond the limits of your school curriculum. Travel is relevant if your experience goes beyond two weeks in the sun.
Work Experience
For mature students, or those returning to the academic world after an interval, work experience should figure in your UCAS personal statement. It is usually the case that mature students make their minds up about the courses they want to apply for and the careers they want to follow as a result of experience in the working world, so that experience will be of the first relevance in your personal statement.
The business manager wants to do an MBA, the auxiliary nurse wants to do a nursing degree, or the classroom assistant wants to do a PGCE – all of these need to give detailed information about what they have done and how much they know. The school-leaver, however, will not add to his or her attractions by mentioning proudly in the UCAS personal statement that he or she has worked in Macdonald’s on Saturdays. You have to remember all the time what the admissions tutor is looking for in your personal statement. It is very important to mention any hobbies and interests, which show your commitment or a dynamic element to your personality. Explain why you choose to take up hobbies and what you have achieved by doing them. You can link this to how these hobbies help your studying if you are feeling clever!
The UCAS personal statement is the only point in the application procedure where the university admissions tutor comes into direct contact with you yourself. The form will also carry a school reference, signed by the principal of your school or college and written by you tutor or head of year. Your school or college, however, is dedicated to the task of ensuring that you have the best possible chance of attaining a place on the course of your choice and will give a very positive account of you which the admissions tutor may find not really very informative. The reference acts as a guarantee, more than anything else, that you are what and who you say you are. The real picture of you will appear in your UCAS personal statement, which is a piece of your autobiography that can truly show your abilities and ambitions.
In the process of constructing you personal statement it is a good idea to go through the following procedures and checks
– Create a list of your ideas before you write your main statement.
– Ask your friends, family and anyone else for their thoughts on your statement!
– Check university and college prospectuses as they usually tell you the criteria and qualities that they want their students to demonstrate.
When writing the personal statement you should make every effort to note the following:
– Don’t make any spelling or grammar mistakes!
– Be enthusiastic but not gushing!
– Don’t say too much about things that are not relevant – if you think that you are starting to, take a break and come back to your statement when you feel more focused.
– Don’t leave it to the last minute.
The best idea for writing your personal statement is to write what is true and what comes naturally to you. You should keep the tone of your statement formal but not too formal because you still want your personality to shine through. You should look at each sentence individually to ensure that it brings a good, strong point to your statement.
So, results day has come and gone and, for a 29th year in a row, pupils in Britain achieved higher results than ever before. With many universities asking for at least one A* star grade, and more and more students achieving these academic heights, the competition for university places has never been tougher. With the added incentive of attempting to beat next year’s rise in tuition fees, the sheer number of people applying weighed against the number of places available means even students who score the top grades may miss out on their first choice.
There are still options for those who did not quite get the grades they needed. If you’ve narrowly missed out, gaining an A grade instead of an A* for example, it may be worth checking with your chosen institution whether they would be prepared to accept you with this slightly lower grade. While this has often been the case in the past, prepare yourself for universities to be extra fussy this year. They can afford to be with so many people chasing a few precious places.
If you definitely have not made it to the university of your choice, there is no need to despair just yet. As always, there will be a number of places at various universities that have not been filled and you may be able to find an alternative institution or course that matches your goals and interests. The ‘clearing’ process, which is also run through UCAS, is designed to match up students who have not secured places to those that are still available.
The clearing process can de daunting and scary, particularly with alarmist news reports and technological problems standing in your way. Rest assured, however, that by approaching it in a clam and determined manner you may still be able to achieve your dream of studying at university level.
Use our sample personal statements to your advantage. These can help to understand the structure and format that is required when writing your own personal statementA personal statement can be the key to a successful university application and we offer loads of resources to help you get your personal statement right! Have a look at our advice on writing your personal statement, view statement samples in our Statement Library.
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Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum