The personal statement is part of your UCAS application. It's how you show your chosen universities why you'll make a great student and why they should make you an offer. Your personal statement length can be up to 4, characters long. This may sound a lot, but it's only about 1 side of typed A4 paper. You need to keep it concise and make sure it's clear and easy to read.
Although you can apply for up to 5 courses on your UCAS application, you can only submit 1 personal statement. So it needs to cover all your course choices. Lots of students who apply to university have achieved the basic entry requirements and many more students apply than there are places available. Admissions teams can use your UCAS personal statement to get to know you and decide why you're more suitable than other applicants. Some universities read every personal statement and score them.
Then they use them alongside your qualifications and grades to decide whether to offer you a place or interview. Other universities put less emphasis on the personal statement and use it with students who have borderline entry requirements. Universities might refer to your personal statement again on results day if you don't get the grades you need. So a good personal statement could clinch you a uni place even if your grades aren't what you hoped for.
Starting your personal statement can seem scary when you're staring at a blank screen. But, things will seem less daunting once you start. Ideally, you want to leave yourself plenty of time — a few weeks or even months — to plan and write your personal statement. Try not to leave it to the last minute, as tempting as this may seem when you've got so many other things to think about. Why do you want to study at university? Why do you want to study this subject?
How did you become interested in this subject? What career do you have in mind after university? How have your current studies affected your choice?
What do you enjoy about your current studies? What skills have you gained from your current studies? How can you demonstrate you have the skills and qualities needed for the course? What qualities and attributes would you bring to the course and university? What work experience including part-time, charity and volunteer work do you have and what have you learnt from it?
What positions of responsibility have you held? Students need to put a lot of time into making sure the UK course they are applying for is right for them. Starting a Personal Statement without having thoroughly researched university and course options is one of the most fundamental mistakes a student could make. Spelling and grammar mistakes can really count against students, and can make their writing appear sloppy or poorly thought through.
Top tip: Encourage your students to print out their Personal Statement. Whilst we know that a lot of students do more things digitally these days and BridgeU is an online platform after all! Whilst they are very positive and well-worded statements about why a student might want to study astrophysics, or Shakespearian literature, both these Personal Statement examples tip very quickly into cliche and generalisation.
Remember — the key to an excellent Personal Statement is showing, not telling. So why is Shakespeare still relevant to today? What specific examples could a student writing about a 16th century author use to demonstrate their relevance to the 21st century?
Likewise, proclaiming a love for the wonders of the night sky is all well and good, but why did it make our example student want to study Physics? Top tip: Encourage students to set a limit on the number of adjectives or descriptive phrases they use in their writing. Extracurricular activities are a vital part of any Personal Statement. If used in the right way, they can help a student to stand out, and seem like a more well-rounded person.
Extracurriculars can also help to showcase valuable soft skills that universities value in their students. Top tip: When planning their Personal Statement, students need to think about the extracurricular activities that can demonstrate soft skills. What did they learn from doing this particular extracurricular activity? Do they think it will set them apart in their overall application? Remember what we said about exuberant language and cliches? But quotes used clumsily can often have the opposite effect, and make the writer of a Personal Statement seem pretentious or just quoting for the sake of it.
A student who is submitting an application for psychology may feel it necessary to begin their Personal Statement with a quote from Sigmund Freud. At times, especially when you fill out an application electronically or have to cut and paste, word limits will be defined by physical space. In some cases, you may lose special characters or paragraph breaks, and words over the maximum allowable count may be cut off.
The safest practice is to proofread anything you send electronically within the very form in which it is sent. Other online sites that give space to the subject of length and form in personal statements are these:. Skip to main content.
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