So, you’ve raced through your UCAS form¹, made your choices and wracked your brain remembering every exam you’ve ever sat and what grades you got for them. Now all that’s left is the personal statement. Sounds easy doesn’t it, after all how hard can it be to sum up your entire life, achievements and make yourself stand out from a crowd of hundreds² in just 4000 characters and 47 lines?

The basics

Your personal statement is, along with your predicted grades and your teachers reference, the most important part of your UCAS form and it’s the only one you have complete control over: teachers will predict grades and write references based mostly on your first year of Sixth Form/college and there’s relatively little you can do to change either now. You have a rigidly enforced limit of 4,000 characters and 47 lines, whichever comes first³, and if you go over the online form will cut you off mid-word. This is perhaps the most difficult aspect of the entire form and most students find themselves cutting down their early drafts substantially. You can’t meddle around with font or font size to gain an advantage as the form has a specific font it uses and anything cut and pasted will be automatically converted to it. The box on the UCAS form times out after 35 minutes of being open and doesn’t have any spelling or grammar checkers so it’s strongly recommended you write in Word, Google Docs or your choice of word processor first, and copy and paste into the form when you’re ready. Teachers prefer this as it’s easier for them to edit and make suggestions in this format than on the UCAS form. Don’t worry about paragraph breaks, these don’t show up in the UCAS format and don’t count towards your line limit but do take care with your formatting once you copy and paste across, as it can become a bit wonky with only a few words per line which looks awful. Finally this isn’t the time to be modest so lose that British reserve and talk yourself up.

So what do I write?

To begin with write anything and everything. Just get something down as one of the biggest obstacles for writing any kind of long prose is a blank screen. Write a skeleton or rough structure which you can fill in later, or write one killer paragraph which you can build around: it’s entirely down to what works best for you. Broadly speaking, your personal statement wants to cover the following topics:

• Why you want to do the course/courses you’ve applied for. Hopefully by now you’ve narrowed down your choices to one or two closely-related fields⁴ and you need to say why that is. What’s making you want to give up 3-7 years of your life to study this subject and where does this information come from? The last thing universities want is someone with no real interest in their subject and who will just drift along.

• How your current subjects will help you in your chosen degree. If there’s a particular module or topic in your current subjects that’s closely related to the degree(s) you want to study then talk about it in as much detail as you can. If you’ve got a subject that seems a bit random and unrelated to your others, and the degree you want to study, it’s particularly important to say how that relates. This will show universities that you’ve made conscious choices in your studies and thought ahead. It also shows that you’ve researched the courses you’ve applied to⁵ and have a clear understanding of what you’re letting yourself in for.

• Any work experience in the field. Work experience is becoming more and more important for separating students and if you don’t have any, you need to arrange some for the summer/Christmas/Easter holidays: speak to your careers advisor or Connexions PA for help with this. You can briefly mention paid work in the Employment section of the form but your personal statement is the only place you can go into detail, as well as the only place you can mention voluntary work. Work experience shows that you can act professionally and handle multiple workloads. It can also show you have knowledge of your subject in the wider world and what you could be doing after you’ve got your degree. If you’ve been on visit days or part of any project that involves working with a university, make sure to mention that here.

• Hobbies and any extra-curricular activities. Universities want to see well-rounded individuals who can do more than just study but remember that you’ve got to make yourself stand out. Responsibilities in school or your community show maturity and, as with work experience, an ability to handle different workloads and roles.

• Introduction/conclusion. This might sound obvious to some⁶, but if you’re not used to writing extended prose you may forget that you need to have an introduction and conclusion, otherwise you’re just writing a list. The introduction is normally tied in to why you want to study the subject, but it doesn’t have to be, whilst the conclusion is normally just a summary consisting of a couple of lines.

Ultimately, your personal statement is all about you and that makes it difficult to give hard-and-fast rules about how much space each section should take up: if everyone follows a strict formula then it’s not personal to anyone. A general rule of thumb used across the country is that talking about the subject you want to study should take up a third, talking about the subjects you’re studying now and work experience should be another third, and talking about yourself, including hobbies, should take up the rest. However, this should be taken as a suggestion and can be tweaked/ignored altogether and if you’ve got an amazing bit of work experience or spent a lot of time at university because of the subjects you want to study then absolutely give them priority at the expense of other sections. There is a wealth of information on the UCAS website with examples and videos on how to write the personal statement.

Do’s and Don’ts

As individual and unique as a personal statement should be, there are still some common errors you really want to avoid, as well as some good practice that will make sure your personal statement gets to the top of the pile.

Do spell check

Make sure you check your personal statement for spelling, punctuation and grammar as a poorly written statement is going straight in the shredder. Take care to proof-read your work and don’t just rely on a spell-checker as these won’t pick up on inappropriate words if they’ve been spelled correctly⁷. Do not, under any circumstances, write in l33t and ensure all your I’s are capitalised as your teachers will hate going through and correcting each one, and you want your teachers onside right now. A good test for a well-written personal statement is to read it aloud: a good statement will flow naturally and not cause you to feel awkward or trip over your words.

Don’t repeat yourself

You have a difficult character limit, don’t waste space by repeating yourself. The form contains an awful lot of information in previous sections so you don’t need to repeat any of it, the admissions tutor already has it. The only time you should mention something which has already been written earlier is if you want to expand upon it and give a lot more detail. It’s good to say “My experience writing for h2g2.com has helped me with…” or how your subjects will make you a better student, but don’t simply write what subjects you’ve studied as they already have that from the Education section.

Be yourself and be unique

Your personal statement has to be personal and it needs to sound authentic so resist the temptation to sound “smart”: your grades will tell the admissions tutor how clever you are, your personal statement tells them about you and it’s a rare 18 year old who uses the word obfuscate. When talking about hobbies, make them relevant and a selling point: most teenagers enjoy going the cinema with their friends so that’s not enough. If you enjoy the nuance of storytelling, or look out for different film-making techniques then say so. The one exception to this rule is humour: humour is a risk as what sounds hilarious to you might fall flat, or worse, be offensive to the person reading your statement. Generally it’s best to steer clear and leave the jokes for Freshers Week.

Avoid the clichés

Always make it easy for the person reading your statement to like you and a big part of that is not being boring or clichéd. An extremely common opening paragraph is:

”I have been passionately interested in this subject my entire life and I think will make an extremely good student because…”

Teachers and admissions tutors loathe sentences like that and won’t pay much attention to the rest of the statement. Partially it’s because it isn’t true: very few people know what they want to do at university before their mid-teens and claiming you wanted to be an optometrist before you could walk rings false, but mostly it’s because so many people say it they get tired of reading it. The best way to avoid clichés is to be honest and be yourself.

Do write multiple drafts

And get others to check them. A good personal statement will have gone through a minimum of five drafts and most need more. Show your drafts to as many people as possible as each will pick up on new things, bring new expertise or highlight mistakes others have missed. It’s particularly important to show your personal statement to the person who will be writing your reference as you can highlight the bits you think are really important and they can mention those in your reference, and if you use technical language you need to show it to an expert in that area as they will be able to help you with use of that technical language. Whilst everyone will have their own opinions, it’s important to remember this is yours and if someone suggests something that doesn’t seem like you, change it or replace it.

Don’t lie or plagiarise

Just don’t do it, you will get caught and it may result in you being barred from using UCAS ever again⁸. University admissions tutors tend to be very experienced and can tell when things don’t add up and when a student is lying. Remember they don’t have give a reason for why they’ve rejected you and you don’t get a chance to appeal. Even worse than being rejected straight away is being called for an interview and then asked to talk about something you said you’re an expert in and in truth know nothing about. As for plagiarism, the software contains a program that compares your statement against every other statement ever written, as well as ‘Write your personal statement’ websites and suspected plagiarism is highlighted for both teachers and UCAS. Just don’t do it.

Finished!

So you’ve drafted it more times than you can count, gotten approval from everyone, banished every typo and brought your masterpiece in under the character/line limit. Congratulations! Now all you have to do is save it, agree to the terms and conditions for UCAS and send it to your teachers. Try not to laugh too hard as they have to go through a similar process for writing your reference.