Personal Statements

All our students will receive timely guidance from the Sixth Form team and their tutors regarding personal statements. We will run sessions to enable students to get the best out of Unifrog’s fantastic personal statement drafting tool, and students will receive advice on drafts from the tutor and any relevant subject teacher.

To give you as parents the low-down, the personal statement is arguably the most important part of the UCAS application. A large number of students will achieve really excellent grades, so the personal statement is vital in making them stand out to admissions tutors. Students can enter up to 4000 characters, including spaces – roughly an A4 side of Verdana 11 or Times New Roman 12.

So that you are in the loop, our top tips for students are as follows:

Start early: the more time students have, the better!
Expect to do several drafts: they definitely won’t get this perfect first time!
Get it checked: when they have tried hard to create a good, complete draft (and not before!) ask tutors and subject specialist teachers to read it and offer their comments.

Practical tips for great personal statements

The whole personal statement is designed to give students the chance to prove three things that can’t be shown elsewhere in the application:

They are genuinely interested in their subject and understand what studying it will involve.
They have explored their subject beyond their A Level studies.
They have a range of skills, experiences, and personal characteristics that will make them a great undergraduate student of that subject.

Reflection is key

Students should never just list achievements, interests or experience: the most important thing is that they reflect on them. For example:

They shouldn’t just write a list of books they have read. Instead, they should mention something specific they read in a particular book that interested them and explain why.
They shouldn’t just say they went to a lecture… they must refer to something specific the lecturer said and explain why they found it interesting!

Tailor-made statements

Students should also make sure they look carefully at the details of the courses they are applying to, and make sure their personal statement reflects that. This might include referring to particular skills they have that their proposed university course requires, or it might include mentioning some reading they have done that relates to the kinds of things they might study on their course. However, they’ll need to be balanced in the way they do this, because every university will see the same statement, so they must make sure it’s relevant to all their chosen universities.

Honest always

It goes without saying that students must sure it’s totally their own work! UCAS runs EVERY personal statement through its Similarity Detection Service – plagiarism is to be avoid at all costs. Students must also be honest: these people are experts in their fields. If students claim to have read books that they haven’t really read, the admissions staff will know!

Suggested Personal Statement Structure