Personal statement

The personal statement is of course the thing that everyone thinks about most when it comes to making an application. We won’t deal with the content here as we have plenty of other resources to help you with this. But it’s worth us restating the basics: the statement cannot contain more than 4,000 characters (including spaces); it cannot be plagiarized (you will be caught if you do this due to UCAS’s thorough detection system); and you should write the entire statement in a word-processor document file, saving it and backing it up, before then copying and pasting the text into this section of the application. Otherwise you’ll lose your whole statement in the event of your web browser crashing!

Making a payment

Once the personal statement has been filled in, your final involvement in the application is making the payment for it. This fee currently stands at £23, though if you apply to only one course there’s a discount. This part is really just a question of filling in your card details like you would if you were shopping for anything else online!

Reference

Strangely enough, one of the most important parts of the application is one that you don’t even write yourself: the reference. If you’ve applied via an institution, once you’ve filled in the other sections of the application everything will automatically go to your referee for them to fill it in. If you’re applying as an individual then you’ll fill in contact details for them and they’ll be sent a link through which they fill in the reference.

Whether you’re applying as an individual or through a centre, a key thing here is to make sure you give your referee time to write the reference for you. The deadlines that UCAS make for applications include the reference, so it’s essential that your referee knows when they need to get everything sent off by.