Although the summer is upon us, it’s in fact certainly not uncommon for people to still be looking to apply to university with a view to starting when the summer ends. For both undergraduates and postgraduates there’s still time to get on a course for this autumn.

But you’ll have to be quick. And more often than not what slows people down in getting their last-minute application in on time is the writer’s block that comes with having to produce a personal statement. So we thought today, for the benefit of those of you in the process of firing in an eleventh hour university application, we’d provide a quick rundown on getting yourself ready to write your personal statement.

The thought of writing a personal statement generally sends shivers down people’s spine. And it’s no wonder, given what the task demands: producing a short document that eloquently puts across the case for you being accepted onto a university course. It’s a challenge that immediately raises dozens of thorny questions, amongst them: What should I include? How positive should I be about my achievements? How do I avoid sounding boastful?

Like so many things in life, however, what can sound like an impossible task becomes a lot simpler if you break it down into smaller pieces and attack it in a logical way. It helps enormously if you start the process of producing your personal statement by focusing on what to include. This begins by thinking about the broad areas that admissions officers will be interested in. Generally speaking, these can be broken down into the following broad areas: your motivation for your chosen course, your current studies and additional study you have done relating to your chosen course, relevant work or voluntary experience you have carried out in preparation for the course, and your hobbies and other interests. Exactly which ones of these you write the most about depends on a combination of how much you have to say about these areas and the nature of the course you are applying for.

Now that we’ve identified these main areas, the next step is to start listing the information relevant t you for each of them. So, using those different areas as your main headings, start brainstorming bits of information. These could be things like details of your most recent job, aspects of studying your subject that you’ve most enjoyed, books related to the subject that you’ve read recently, and so on. At this stage of the process, your main goal is to have a big stash of these experiences to draw on.

And once you’ve amassed this information, your next step is to start being selective about it. One of the big errors students make is that they try and pack in every single thing they have ever done, making for a statement that leaves no room for discussing your achievements in any real detail. So, identify the most relevant and impressive things from each category; these will be the things that you talk about in your first draft of the statement.

You’re almost ready to start writing, but before you do you need to devise a structure to your statement. The personal statements that fall flat are the ones where the writer simply throws information at the reader in no logical order, jumping from work experiences to hobbies and then onto their studies in the space of the same paragraph. The way to avoid this is simply to use the headings from your earlier brainstorming as paragraph headings, with the majority of the information you give about each individual area being contained in the same paragraph. Although there’s some flexibility in terms of what order the paragraphs come in, generally speaking it’s best to start off with one relating to your motivation.

So once you’ve identified the experiences and achievements you want to talk about, and have also worked out in what order you’ll talk about them, you’re ready to start writing. This is of course the stage that most people try and put off. Don’t worry, no one likes to write about themselves. But it’s important to get over the feeling of self-consciousness as soon as possible. The best way to do this is to keep in mind that anything you write can be deleted at the touch of a button, meaning that if you’re not happy with your first efforts it’s simple to banish them forever. Most writers find that they get it wrong the first time, but in the act of writing something they’re not happy with they work out a way of saying what they actually want to say. So those first faltering attempts to write your statement will actually be hugely helpful in getting you towards your end result!