By Jack Hanson - 12 October 2023
Your UCAS Personal Statement is an essential for applying to university. You may have only heard of it, or you may be trying to write one, so I’m here to show you how to tackle it and come out with a personal statement that universities will love!
1. Deadlines and word counts
The deadline for applying is usually around the end of January but your school may want you to complete it well before then, often in November. It's important to make a note of when your school or college's internal deadline is, so you can get organised and plan ahead. Getting a good head start prepares you and frees up your time for your studies. I’d recommend starting early and thinking about everything you’ve possibly done in life that has helped you or can be shown as a strength.
My issue when I was writing my personal statement was cutting it down to the character count limit, which is either 4,000 characters or 47 lines, whichever you hit first. This sounds like a lot at first, and sometimes it’s hard to meet anywhere around that. Mainly, it's about choosing the best parts, which we’ll get onto next...
2. Getting down to business and WRITING
The hardest part will be starting, choosing an introduction, and deciding what to cover in it, but there is a smart way to do this. First, have a basic structure ready:
- Introduction: you’re writing to a university, more commonly either the subject leader or someone in that field. Whatever subject you’re applying for, focus on that for the intro. Use techniques to attract their attention, like anecdotes or anything that would keep someone’s interest.
- After the intro comes the bulk of your personal statement. This is just a massive area for you to big yourself up. Every achievement you’ve made, every goal you’ve met; basically everything personal, impressive, and safe for broadcast that you’ve ever done goes here. If you can highlight key areas in your life and structure these paragraphs around them, it will make for a better personal statement. A few key things to think about include: why you want to study that subject at university, the things that you have done that relate to your course, any work experience and extra-curricular activities you've taken part in and your interests outside of school and college. It's important not to just list your skills and experiences, but to use them as evidence for why you'd be a great fit for your course.
- Then after all that, the conclusion - this will just close off your entire personal statement so leave no questions unanswered. Try and emphasise some of the main points, keep that fresh in the readers mind. Keep it concise and avoid adding new information and lastly, use transitional phrases, such as; in conclusion, to summarise, etc.
3. To include or not to include?
It can be very hard to know what to choose to put into your personal statement. Most guides will give general pointers, like covering your achievements. But it's important to tailor what you write to what's most relevant to your subject. Courses like maths for example, will look for traits like logic, problem solving, etc whereas English literature will look for creativity, analysis, etc.
So to choose what to include, you’ll first need to research what traits are most desired in your field of study. Choose about 5-10, then see what life events or achievements you can cover that link to those traits. Take things you’ve done previously from jobs, sports teams, charity, volunteering, virtually anything extra-curricular and even things in school which are exclusively choices made by you.
I previously mentioned linking paragraphs together, or at least the general content. This is because it’s important for it to flow, rather than jumping erratically. For example, going from, ‘I have good teamwork skills because I played football,’ to, ‘and I’m an independent learner because I am a chess champion,’ and then back to, ‘I’m also very social and have leadership qualities from playing rugby.’ It’s too jumpy, and with universities reviewing upwards of hundreds to potentially thousands of candidates, you want something that’s easy to follow and interesting to keep the reader’s attention. So don't be afraid to move sentences or sections around later to where it's a better fit.
4. Second opinions
You’ve written your first draft, read over it and you think it’s good. Send it off! Actually, just wait a second. You wrote it, you put all that effort into it, of course you’re going to think it’s at least decent. You need an unbiased second opinion to critically analyse what’s good, what’s bad, what to take out, to put in, etc.
For this, go to 4-5 people, ask for their opinions, write down anything constructive and take it away to improve your draft. They can be a teacher, parent, sibling, friend, university professor or careers advisor that you may know, anyone (within limits). This can open your eyes to certain aspects and perspectives you haven’t thought of while writing or reading it over.
Even if you’ve done all of this, if you have completed your personal statement early, give yourself a week away from it, read it back over to see if you still feel comfortable and the same about it all. If so, then it’s 100% ready.
5. Last words
Be yourself and be honest. If it comes time for an interview and you said you read an entire dissertation on the subject and you didn’t, they’ll know when they question you. Lastly, use a proof reader tool, as grammar mistakes will certainly not look good to universities! There’s plenty online and some are built into document writers. But no matter what, writing a compelling UCAS personal statement is a crucial step in your journey to university admission.
Oh, and don’t be tempted to copy a friend or worse, use AI. Universities use software to check whether your personal statement is unique and hasn’t been plagiarised, and besides, why would you want to leave your chances of getting into university in the hands of artificial intelligence that doesn’t know the journey you’ve been on to get to this point?
One last thing… save, save, save! Make sure you’ve got your work saved and backed up to avoid any IT mishaps, it might save you a fair bit of time.
By following these tips, you can craft a personal statement which reflects your passion, achievements and aspirations. Remember that your personal statement is your opportunity to stand out and make a positive first impression on admissions officers. With proper and careful planning, you can present your best self. So don’t hesitate – start working on it early and take that first step towards your academic future. Best of luck!
