Sample English Personal Statement
Reading is one of the chief pleasures of my life, and always has been, and I have developed a strong sense of the power of literature to convey human feeling and to respond imaginatively to the world we live in. Language itself interests me in its many varieties, registers and moods. My mother tongue is English, but I also have working Urdu and Arabic.
After leaving school I went abroad and studied Arabic for two years, after which I taught the language in a number of academies, both as a paid teacher and as a volunteer with children. I am applying as a mature student, and I have also given voluntary reading tuition to children in the neighbourhood. Managing this alongside my college duties has allowed me to develop good skills of organization and self-discipline, which leads me to believe that I could make a considerable success of a degree course in English. My ultimate ambition is to qualify professionally as an English teacher and devote my career to showing my pupils the power of literature to change one’s view of the world and to understand what the human imagination is capable of.
Amongst the novels which have inspired me is Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, which first attracted me because of its treatment of a specific historical period, the Great Depression. The real strength of the book, however, lies in the way Steinbeck conveys the tragic loneliness of the itinerant workers he describes. It is a really moving scene when Crooks, Candy and Lenny think for a moment that the rabbit farm