If you’re planning on going to university next year, it is more than likely that you are either in the process of trying to put together your UCAS personal statement or trying to force your brain to think about doing so.

In fact, many people find it difficult to get beyond said stage of mental block and actually start turning their ideas into a draft UCAS personal statement. Even when they have plucked up the courage to sit in front of a computer and start typing, on the first few attempts it’s more than likely that the strain of trying to write a zinger of an opening line–or any opening line, in fact–will induce a bout of procrastination and putting off the task of writing the statement, right until the fear of missing their school’s/the official UCAS deadline becomes too intense to put the task off any longer.

If you were hoping for a blog post about great opening lines to UCAS personal statements, we’re unfortunately not going to be able to oblige you. And there’s a good reason for this. With the goal of a personal statement being to convey your personality–the clue is in the name of the thing–a one-size-fits-all approach to this task is impossible.

We can, however, give you two pieces of advice about creating a great UCAS personal statement opening line. The first is to not worry about it at first, and instead focus your efforts on the main substance of the statement. The chances are that this’ll get your creative juices flowing and make the opening line much easier once you come back to it.

The second is to under no circumstances give in to the temptation of resorting to the sorts of clichs that have been blighting the first sentences of UCAS personal statements for years. We’re talking about the ones that seem to be practically begging the admissions officer to stop reading there and then and chuck the statement on the reject pile.

If you do a search online, you’ll find plenty of discussions on what UCAS personal statement openers get people’s goat. But here, in a nutshell, are the main three categories of them:

1: A quotation

At some point an overly influential teacher must have told their students that high-powered academics are inexplicably impressed by random quotations culled from books or the Internet. The ruse somehow caught on, and ever since then, and with virtually no considerations of quality control or appropriate context, students have been shoehorning the first vaguely impressive-sounding quotation they’ve come across into the first sentence of their personal statements. All they are proving, however, is that they know how to type the phrase “quotes about” and the name of their subject into Google.

2: “Ever since…”, “For as long as I can remember…” and so on

While trying to convey your enthusiasm for your subject is all well and good, you really need to find a way of doing it other than just claiming that it is something that has been with you since before you had the intelligence or self-awareness to know a) what the subject was or b) what studying a subject even meant.

3: Anything that already exists on the Internet as the opening line of an example personal statement

It’s not difficult to find model UCAS personal statements posted online. And while many of them are very good, if the opening line they contain is even remotely memorable you can be sure that in any given year at least fifty people will steal it and use it as their own. Admissions officers are fully aware of this, and they like nothing more than to catch out a copycat by typing standout phrases from their personal statements into Google and seeing what hits they get. And when they see that the opener has been lifted from elsewhere, they’re probably not going to be reading the rest of the statement with a particularly open mind.