How to write a KILLER personal statement!!

uh today we will be talking about personal statements and how to write a killer personal statement specifically now just as a slight sort of background i've read literally thousands of personal statements because i've been involved with admissions at oxford university for about a decade or so so i do have a lot of experience of reading personal statements but of course i'm used to reading personal statements that are focused on social sciences and humanities subjects because i'm a politics tutor and i'm also used to people writing personal statements for the benefit of oxford so my advice will be relevant to all research intensive universities but it is advice based on my personal reflections so please do solicit advice from various sources this is not going to be the final word on how to write a really powerful personal statement so just be clear on that okay anyway i'm going to share my screen so you can see my presentation okay so rightly killer personal statement now should you wish to look at these slides later or now indeed if you go to this website tinyurl forward slash u o o as in university of oxford p s personal statement then you'll find them there so tinyurl.com forward slash university of oxford personal statement okay and let's get started now just as a just to sort of keep it visually entertaining i've provided pictures photographs courtesy of the wonderful wikipedia from all 24 of the so-called russell group universities that's because these 24 universities have a very similar approach to personal statements they're looking for answers to three questions and i'll outline in a second but please be very careful with the russell group brand because it's a self-selecting brand in other words participant universities pay a subscription to be members of that group and that doesn't necessarily mean that they are going to be the best universities for you depending on what you'd like to study where you'd like to study and so forth there are for example many fantastic universities that are not that don't come under the russell group umbrella so for example the university of swansea the university of aberystwyth the university of reading the university of leicester fantastic world-class universities with very strong strength with great strength in certain fields but not in the russell group and the advice i'm going to give today would apply to those universities just as well the key point that the russell group have in common is that they are research intensive universities they predominantly offer academic degrees so that means that your personal statement needs to be tilted towards the interests of an academic not the interest of someone who is preparing you for a more vocational course so that's why i'm generalizing for the russell group predominantly today but please be clear that this idea that the russell group other good universities and anything else is somehow a poor alternative is simply false and it depends on what works best for you what the best university is in your ranking don't get too head up by rankings produced by universe by newspapers etc anyway how to get started so you need in your personal statement to answer the following three questions in 4 000 characters so you don't have a great deal of space and that's what you need to try and sort of get across what is your motivation for applying to this particular course or courses what evidence do you have for this motivation what do you do you know what you're getting yourself in for by applying to this particular degree program okay so let me just go through all of those in turn i should note that i've i've provided the images of the russell group universities in alphabetical order so we're starting with the with the lovely university of birmingham right here so first of all um if you're applying for an academic degree you need to express as such in your motivations for applying to the course in other words you need to tilt the wording of your personal statement to academic matters not vocational matters so i'm going to give you some examples of if you like do's and don'ts so a is an example of what would not be so effective and b is an example of what would be more effective so a i have wanted to be become a doctor for as long as i can remember i recall visiting my gp as a child and being transfixed by their power okay now the issue with a is that it's not talking about academic matters it's talking solely about vocation now there's no harm in talking to vocation there's no harm in expressing your your ambitions for the future but bear in mind that the the horizons of an admissions tutor at a university are much closer than that they are interested in who can do this course this course which is highly academic and who's going to take that opportunity and run with it and do the best with it yes it can give them some confidence if you say i am i'm motivated to become x in the future a doctor a lawyer a banker whatever but predominantly they're concerned about can you hit the ground running from day one so they're more interested in your academic interests and so b does a much better job how does aspirin relieve pain my interest in medical sciences began as a child with a sore knee recently i've researched uncover the magic of acetosalic acid okay um so why is b better well in both cases they talk about childhood uh creation origins of an interest in medicine and some people worry that you can't talk about well i've been interested in this subject for years because it's a bit of a cliche but it's not a problematic cliche personal statements are little short biographies they're explanations of you and what you're interested in so if you happen to have developed an interest as a child that's fine it's useful to know at the same time it's not required i think a lot of people think that we are looking for someone who's had at least a decade's worth of yearning for a particular subject in order to be serious contender and that's not the case so don't feel the need to have some sort of long-standing obsession with a particular subject because most people don't have that so it wouldn't be realistic um but if you do have that it's also it's not going to do you any harm to speak about it and to speak honestly about what dragged you into the subject but don't forget focus on the academic interest so where b does that b talks about how the the chemistry of aspirin aspirin being derived from willow bark and how this person reflected on the really fascinating biochemical science that connects a particular drug to a particular outcome and you can see that this is someone who's not just thinking about well one day i will become a doctor but they're thinking about when i start my medical degree i'm going to be doing some really fascinating intense and difficult science medical science so hopefully you can see the difference a is too much focused on the very long term b is much more focused on the immediate term and that's what admissions tutors will be interested in as well okay evidence right now this is an image of the fantastic university of bristol which is where i did my first degree and the key point with evidence is that you ought to show don't just tell now what i mean by that is you must provide proof most personal statements will sound a little bit like a love letter from a feckless husband in other words they'll tell their lover oh i love you dearly i'll do anything for you but they don't provide any proof of that so this is a husband that cheats perennially on his long-suffering partner who never actually substantiates the claims of being in love with his with his wife this is perhaps a bit of a torture metaphor but the point i'm getting at is that talk is cheap very very cheap it's easy to say that you love medicine law archaeology pharmacology whatever you need to prove it don't just say it now i know i'm getting a little bit agitated here that's because i've seen this literally hundreds and hundreds of times it's a young person with fantastic potential who just says proclaims this wondrous desire to study a particular subject but they don't have a shred of proof that they have actually got that interest and that's not good enough the universities will not take you seriously unless you have some evidence so here's some examples so a studying law will give me superpowers i'm endlessly fascinated by how legal disputes arise are taken through court and ultimately settled i could recall cases happily on christmas day now that is cheap talk prove it don't just say you've done these things prove it and b proves it i am applying to study law because i'm fascinated by how legal professionals trade in language the 2015 uk supreme court that's uksc case of hotak vs lb southwark london borough southwark turned on the interpretation of vulnerable which parliament had left deliberately vague now the difference between a and b is that b is communicating their fascination with the law but without actually having to just say so you know how much you can communicate your your desire your motivations without actually having to explicitly say i am fascinated you can tell someone that you've done this reading this research and that will communicate your fascination without it needing to be explicitly stated okay so hopefully that uh difference is clear all right um so getting back to it all right so next up we've got the university of cambridge uh and the point here is do you know what you're getting yourself in for can you communicate in your personal statement that you get what a degree in this subject entails now that means you need to do some research into what the course entails what sort of learning what sort of resources you're likely to encounter from day one a good example of this is that if students talk about academic texts that they've read then that's a good sign because they know that they're going to have to read academic style works from the from the get-go so that means academic journal articles that means academic books what's not impressive is if someone reads an introductory text to their course and proclaims that on their personal statement because anyone can read an introductory text but you've got to be able to read and engage critically with academic works so if for example you're applying for medicine don't just tell us that you've read popular science works because anyone could read those tell us that you're reading the lancet tell us that you're reading the bmj tell us you're reading the latest research to do with the covet 19 pandemic make sure that they the the level of reading is the same level that you would have to read from day one of your degree and all of a sudden your admissions tutor is going to feel a lot more comfortable okay this is someone that gets it they know what it's going to take to do this course and to do it well from the get-go now here's some examples of uh do's and don'ts with regard to the study of arabic so a says learning to speak arabic will allow me to communicate with people living throughout north africa and the middle east that's fine it's true but that is a tiny slice of what a degree in arabic or indeed any modern languages degree provides and b gets it much better b says studying arabic will allow me to see the world differently through an ancient culture and rich literary heritage i am particularly keen to study islamic architecture now a is too fixated on the language part of the modern languages b realizes that the language is just a tool to understand the culture languages degrees typically are broader than just studying a language and so you need to reflect that ambition that desire to study the gamut not just the particular focus okay so make it clear from your personal statement that you know what you're getting yourself in for right so if you're applying for medicine you need to talk about top journals if you're applying for a degree with multiple facets to it you need to give some sense that you get what those different facets are okay so for example with arabic you're not just learning a language you're learning about a whole culture and history and literature and architecture and all sorts of other things okay so let's move on um put the personal interpersonal statement now most personal statements are surprisingly impersonal in other words they don't really tell us that much about you as an individual which is a real shame because we're trying to get to know you this is a little bit like an interview committed to paper where you're trying to sort of give us key data on you as a person and we're trying to calculate or should we offer your place or should we not and that makes it quite sad if the personal statement actually doesn't reflect you very well and is you trying to hide behind other people that would be akin to going into you to an interview and rather than answering the questions authentically for yourself you answer them the way someone else might but then that kind of defeats the point of an interview so make sure that your personal statement is personal now what do i mean specifically by that well here we start off with the university of cardiff um and one thing is that i'm often asked is whether or not you should quote people now you can quote someone but a quote is by definition impersonal it's someone else's words so you can you can only quote i would say if you're going to use that quote to better express yourself don't quote someone just to show off some stuff you know because frankly it's not impressive you can find quotes these days within milliseconds on google so knowing quotes is not in the least bit impressive using quotes is a different story but if you're going to use quotes bear in mind that you're going to use up your own characters allowing someone else to speak on your behalf so it better be worth it anyway a is an example of how not to do it if if all the economists were laid end to end they wouldn't reach a conclusion i entirely agree with this that's impersonal that's a bit like going to an interview and saying well i'm not going to answer but i'm going to allow someone else to answer for me it's not good enough b is better if all the economists were laid end to end they would not reach a conclusion i'm not troubled by this economics like any science must not pretend to unearth absolute truth so b is reflecting on the quote is analyzing the quote is adding some value to the quote is not just passively putting the quote down and allowing it to speak on their behalf that's the key difference okay so don't let your personal statement become impersonal all right next up we've got a picture of the university of durham uh speak like yourself a lot of people adopt some sort of bizarre flowery vernacular that they think all academics speak which we don't and we'd much rather that you just communicated clearly and precisely rather than trying to use exaggerated i don't know elocution right so a is an example of what not to do the art of medicine consists of amusing the patient whilst nature cures the disease quote voltaire i unalterably concur with this vaulting sentiment advances in medical sciences have merely extended our capacity to amuse and it's just difficult to comprehend what the author's trying to say because they're using such long pompous words it's really not necessary you're not being tested on your vocabulary you're being tested on whether or not you are motivated to apply what you've done to provide evidence for those motivations and whether you know what you're getting yourself in for that that's what you're being judged on in a good personal statement not does this person have an enormous dictionary in their bedroom okay b does it better the art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease this is broadly true but i would not describe the use of a bedside manner as art there is plenty of science to it so in the case of b they're just using words of two syllables and it's fine it's clear it's easy to understand it's it's perfectly acceptable so don't think that you need to have sort of multi-syllabic complicated jargon to get it to get your meaning across if you if you want to use technical jargon that's fine but again use it to express a genuine personal connection to the subject that you want to study but don't just throw it in there as a some sort of bomb that sort of shows off how much stuff you know because frankly that's not impressive okay next we've got the university of edinburgh and the point for this slide is that we want you to be quite self-reflective if you want your personal statement to elevate itself to being truly personal you need to tell us about your reflections on what you've done what did you think in other words when you read something when you watched something when you listened to something when you experienced something what did you take away from that what did you feel when you did that that's the sort of thing that elevates a personal statement now please don't worry if your thoughts on what you've done are a little bit half-formed because obviously we're not admitting students that are already perfect academics otherwise there'd be no point in you coming to learn with us so you know we are expecting you to be trying out ideas and to be a little bit unconfident in what you're saying because that's just normal but what we don't want is someone who's not even willing to try he's not even willing to share with us their reflections on what they read who just reads things and sort of says oh that's probably right and just agrees with everything because they're not thinking for themselves they're not developing the critical thinking that we're looking for and please be clear that critical thinking is not just the domain of the sciences the social sciences and humanities natural scientists also look for critical thinking because science is a contestable domain of inquiry so the idea that someone would just credulously agree with everything that a particular scientist has said will mean that they don't really get what science is so that would be very alarming to admissions tutor so try and reflect on what you've done don't just give us a big shopping list of stuff you've read tell us what you thought about what you read okay so here's an example a eh card what is history opened my eyes to the relativism of historical facts i will never read a history book the same again okay passive not speaking for themselves just saying i read this book and it told me what to do and i followed it b eh cars what is history stresses the relativism of historical facts this is an important contribution but would render history little more than unscientific fiction i would argue that history like any science seeks facts but only has partial access to them so i've read and here's what i thought about it not i've read car the end most personal statements just tell us they've read that just the author just tells us they've read stuff as if that's impressive but it isn't what's impressive is someone who reads things and thinks about them and reflects on them so if that means you read less but you think about it more deeply great do that we're not looking for a big quantity of reading we're looking for quality of reading so pick things that are going to stretch you pick things that are academic that will show that you know what you're getting yourself in for with an academic degree but that you then give yourself an opportunity to think about reflective on and and consider for yourself because you are going to contribute to these debates from the day the very day you get to university so you have to start trying now okay but don't worry if you're not entirely confident in what you say because that will come all right uh so um next is structure how can you structure your personal statement oh it's fairly straightforward there just needs to be some sort of beginning middle and end um what often happens is that there's just sort of the the authors just sort of jump around it's a bit of a stream of consciousness it's like reading a virginia woolf novel that you're not entirely sure what's going to come up next you don't need to over structure your essays they don't need to be sort of really rigidly split and segmented into components but just giving some sort of degree of a story excuse me story arc would be helpful so starting off with the university of exeter here so think about how to hook your readers okay how to sort of help them understand the full uh personal statement so some fairly basic uh open uh ways to achieve this would be to of course be clear and make sure your language is easy to understand so it's a good idea to make to allow someone to read it who's not from your from your background not from your discipline so that to see if they can just get what you're trying to say you could use bookending which is a very straightforward way of making sure that your personal statement coheres in other words you start you finish with one particular theme or one particular device so you might if you recall when i spoke about the medical student talking about getting a sore knee and getting interested in pain relief you could finish off with that somehow sort of link it in and then it provides a degree of coherence to the whole piece you need to sort of develop a case for admission so you're trying to make it clear to your readers that you deserve the place above other people that you're competing with now i'll give you a bit more detail on how you might want to do that in a second and you want to make sure you answer the three questions that i outlined at the start what's your motivation for applying what have you done to provide evidence for that motivation and do you know what you're getting yourself in for so you need to answer those questions you don't need to do so explicitly you don't need to sort of say i am motivated to apply for this i have evidence for this and so forth your the way you frame your experiences when you the way you discuss them will answer those questions tacitly um and that's what you need to try and achieve okay so here's the university of glasgow and we can talk a little bit about a logical progression so a structure that very straightforwardly just helps your readers go from the beginning to the end to make sense of what you're trying to say so you're telling a bit of a story a very brief story about yourself and a classic sort of story technique is a sort of climb the mountain technique so you start in the foothills and you summit the top by the end and so the way that metaphor works is that when you're starting the story you're talking about the origins of your interest how you you started to explore around the subject and got interested in it so in the case of the medical student they started to gather their interests because of a sore knee and the powerful impact of aspirin on their pain relief and then you could start to work through various different parts of the subject the discipline of medical sciences in order to build up the case that you deserve to be admitted so you could talk about the substance what do medical scientists study you know they study pharmacology physiology palliative care practical medicinal techniques and so forth then you could link that into the methods so substance and method is a classic progression of thought so not only what do we study but how do we study it would be an interesting thing to talk about then your findings what did you take away from some reading you've done from some experiences you've had and then you can finish with other interests you have which i'll get on to talk about in a minute so it doesn't have to be this particular structure but something that just sort of tells a story that allows your readers to climb the mountain with you i started with this little sort of kernel of an interest and this is how it developed up and up and up okay um what will be read now sorry this is the um this is imperial college london i should say um what is actually going to be read well your admissions tutors are going to have hundreds and hundreds of personal statements to read so you need to sympathize with your readers they will be tied because they will be doing all of their other jobs at the same time as assessing your application so you need to help them you need to hold their hand help them extract the data they're looking for they want to extract that data they want to be able to say this is a candidate that fits our criteria and that we ought to select but you need to make it easy for them so you know be realistic when you're producing your personal statement make sure that you answer the three questions i've mentioned make sure that your answers are clear and accessible and make sure that the structure is such that someone can read it quickly and get the meaning eat with ease don't write something convoluted and complicated with no structure because the readers would probably not give you as much of a benefit of the doubt as you might hope okay right so what's next um so extracurricular activities right now and this is an image of king's college london um so how important are non-academic activities now in the case of oxford and cambridge they are not important in the slightest we don't make admissions decisions on them whatsoever so regardless of how much you're doing outside the classroom that is non-academic i'm afraid it won't make a difference we do not make academic we do not admit people to those universities on that basis ever and the russell group universities are pretty much the same on that particular point because they're ultimately offering places for academic courses so whether or not you're good at sport music or drama is irrelevant to that some universities however do look to see someone who can manage their time who can work cooperatively with others and so forth but for most of the universities that i've been talking about today the russell group they are pretty narrowly interested in your academic ability and your academic potential so if you don't have a huge impressive list of extracurricular activities frankly that's fine okay but you know there are various ways that you can use your extracurriculars more or less efficiently so here's what not to do is to just provide a passive shopping list of stuff that you've done with the hope that that speaks for itself so i am head girl i've played hockey at county level i've just obtained my duke of edinburgh gold award i'm grade 5 and flute and grade 7 in piano now i should know i've written all of these so this is not cut and paste from some poor uh head girl's personal statement um but it's very representative of the sort of things that we read a lot now obviously these are very very impressive achievements and i'm you know i'm not trying to take that away from this person but it doesn't help me answer the question does this person have the academic ability and potential to be worthy of a place at my institution there's no she's not helping me out she's not helping me understand why any of this is relevant she's just sort of assuming that i'm going to be impressed by these things which i am but it's still not relevant so this is a better way of doing it is just to leverage it to make it clear how your extracurricular activities actually do have some academic relevance which they almost certainly will so um it was actually whilst obtaining my duke of edinburgh award that i first experienced sustained geological field work it was so affirming to hunt for evidence of the world's very formation so imagine this is a person applying for geology or earth sciences they are making it clear how the stuff they did outside the classroom actually reinforced their desire their motivation to study this academic discipline and you can do that with pretty much anything so imagine you're applying for physics and you play a musical instrument you can talk about the physics of sound imagine you're a medical student you do a lot of sport you can talk about sports injuries you know just help us out make those links from the non-academic to the academic and all of the universities we're talking about here on the of the russell group will be much more interested in that okay super curricular activities now this is the university of leeds um what counts as an experience so super curricular activity is something that is academically relevant but takes you outside of your a-level syllabus and that can be pretty much anything it can be reading it can be listening to podcasts it can be watching lectures on youtube it can be having work experience of various uh kinds um so don't feel that supercurricular experiences have to be quite elaborate work experiences they can be but they don't have to be and we would not judge someone as a stronger candidate purely on the basis that they have an impressive list of work experiences because frankly they are not equally obtainable you know if someone happens to be lucky enough to live next door to a high court judge and they're applying for law and they've shadowed that said judge on multiple occasions well that's just luck that's not because they are a better candidate so do think fairly openly about what a supercurricular experience is because we will as well we're looking for people that are self-guided because when you start a degree you will have to do quite a lot of work on your own you'll have to identify some of the aspects of a problem and try and research them yourself and so someone who's already tried that out on something that they're interested in that's what we're looking for that's the sort of person that's self-guided independent-minded and they can just hit the ground running from day one so those are the sort of experiences that we're looking for anyway here's an example of what not to say i've not had many opportunities in life i want to become a doctor but no one i know has been to university and a gp shadowing placement planned for the summer was cancelled because of cover 19. i nonetheless want to make sure my children have some of the opportunities i did not have now this is an example of someone using emotional blackmail to try and get their way and it's not a good idea because we will have lots of information about someone's relative disadvantages on their personal statement we'll know for example if they've come out of care we'll know if they are from one of the poorest parts of the country we'll know if they've had any difficulties with their schooling we'll know if they've got any disabilities now by all means you can tell us some more of that data in your personal statement but don't use it as an excuse because there will be a long line of other candidates who will have had similarly difficult backgrounds who won't be making excuses they'll say well i've had these difficulties but here's what i've done nonetheless so don't sort of say i've got difficulties and therefore i've not done much say if you like i've got difficulties but here's what i've been able to do nonetheless that would be much more powerful okay uh so here's an example of what would be better a gp shadowing placement planned for the summer was cancelled because of copper19 instead i took a free online course on epidemiology to understand the pandemic better this led me to volunteer delivering medicines in my community through this i observed firsthand the difficulties in public communication of virus suppression advice now this is another example of someone who's using an experience to leverage an academic point they're not just saying i volunteered delivering medicines they're saying how that got them face to face with an academic puzzle how do scientists communicate the importance of virus suppression and mitigation that is an academic question and they're really sort of highlighting the link between their experience and the academic value of that okay so that's a much better approach to this okay um oh sorry which university was that did i tell you yes leeds did okay here's the university of liverpool so what if you're applying to different degrees at different universities which is not uncommon at all especially if those university degrees are quite sui generic such as say natural sciences at cambridge which is a compound degree that you don't find at every university or philosophy politics and economics or ppe at oxford well basically you need to extract the common denominator subject so here's what not to do philosophy politics and economics ppe is the perfect combination of subjects for me or natural scientists natural sciences has the multi-disciplinary flexibility that will allow me to solve problems of the future like climate change now the problem with that is that any university that does not offer those courses will just reject you immediately if they see that you are writing a personal statement for ppe for example but they don't offer that degree then they just have an excuse to instantly check your application in the bin you don't need to mention pp if for example you're applying to politics degrees at every other university oxford's not going to mind you not referring to that particular degree program because we know that other universities don't offer it so here's a better approach social sciences being the study of human coordination appeals strongly to me my specific desire to pursue a degree in the distribution of power in a society was triggered by a bad summer job working with a tyrannical boss i observed his behavior and considered how tyranny begins on a micro scale and can expand to the scale of our country now in this case they're not saying i want to study ppe they're saying i want to study power and that's basically what most of the courses in ppe do and also any politics degree or politics and economics degree elsewhere in the country would do that as well so that would be fine so just find that common denominator and talk about that okay here is the london school of economics so how do you stand out i'm often asked um and in a good way not in a bad way uh well here's what not to do and i've read this i'm afraid this this is pretty close to a direct quote my father's dying wish was to see me attend universities the first person in my family to ever do so now it's no question this was memorable when i read it but it was memorable for for the wrong reasons again it's emotional blackmail it's someone who's not giving us evidence of their academic motivations they're just trying to pull at our heartstrings now i felt sorry for the person that wrote this because you know obviously yeah they've had a bereavement and they've also been very poorly advised as to how to write a personal statement so it was memorable but it wasn't memorable in a good way better to stand out because of your originality your flair your interest your verve basically all of the advice i've given so far would would make you stand out but just make it clear who you are what you're interested in and what you've done about it so for example in pursuit of my interest in anthropology i've researched the phenomena phenomenon of the dying wish it appears that wishing for a legacy is hardwired with examples of mortality facing declarations from the early earliest archaeological sources particularly in egypt so you know i'm riffing on the notion of a death wish which was mentioned in the last one to bad effect to showing how you can talk about the very phenomenon of a dying wish because in itself that is a fascinating academic puzzle why do people have these death bed wishes why you know animals don't as far as we know care about their legacy so what is it about human beings so anyway that's a way to sort of stand out in a better way because you're showing inquisitiveness now language is important but i'll rattle through this fairly quickly starting off at the university of manchester spelling use british english if you're applying to british university so that means organized with an s not with a z color with a u for example um be careful with homophones so those are words that sound the same but mean something different so program without an me on the end refers to a computer program program with an me on the end refers to what we mean by programs say program of study so just be careful with that distinction be careful with technical terms and especially their different national spellings so etiology is the british english way of spelling that word etiology it's the american english way estrogen and estrogen again british versus american approaches avoid apostrophes it's do not not don't would not not won't etc um punctuation here's the university of newcastle i keep sentences short please for goodness sake some people have sentences that run on for four or five lines which is just desperately difficult to understand don't forget your readers are tired and overstretched so if they're reading very long sentences they will give up i'm afraid and they will just dismiss your application don't misuse semicolons semicolons are meant to be used for bulletin points but they're almost always misused in order to just make this huge compound sentence but usually you can replace them with a full stop and it does everyone a greater benefit please note the difference between an m dash which is in brackets there's a long dash and a hyphen quite a lot of people using a hyphen when they're meant to be using an em dash as a form of punctuation this may sound desperately pedantic but academics are desperately pedantic so you better play the game okay grammar and this is the university of nottingham uh be careful with will and chal if you're not sure how to use those please look up the usage there are usage patterns there's no strict sort of absolute iron rules but there are differences between i will and i shall which may be worth uh checking out on be careful with syntax and subordinating clauses specifically always make it clear who's kicking whom in other words in your sentence you need to make it very easy for the readers to understand the subject the object and the verb if subject object and verb are split up by subordinate clauses and very complicated syntax your meaning will be lost in the model so just avoid that be efficient with your language avoid overusing adjectives and adverbs you know you don't need to say that you're very interested you can just say you're interested you don't need to say you're endlessly fascinated you can just say you're fascinated you can save a lot of character space if you cut out pretty much every adjective in every adverb okay um so i have run out of slides but i've still got seven universities to show you so um because there are 24 russell group universities so here's oxford uh this is the um queen mary university of london uh this is uh queens university in belfast this is university of sheffield this is the university of southampton this is university college london this is warwick university and this is the university of york okay and that leads me on to conclusions so um first of all make sure your personal statement is personal i know that sounds kind of trite and annoying but it's really useful advice i think because most people's personal statements are not personal and by most people i do mean a majority a comfortable majority of people write personal statements that don't tell us sufficient information about that person get some feedback but know when to stop you could show your your draft personal statements to everyone you've ever met but that would be a waste of time and you'll get different uh points from everyone so be careful when seeking feedback not to overdo it and bear in mind that the marginal benefit of multiple drafts of your personal statement is probably not as great as the marginal benefit of practicing say an admissions test admissions tests regardless of which university you're applying for have a much greater impact on your chances of getting in than the personal statement does so be careful don't spend loads of time preparing for your personal statement but having said all of that it is useful to prepare for your personal statement because it makes you better for interviews because then you've got stuff to talk about you can reflect on stuff you've read and you can you can provide some flesh to the bones of your conversations so the personal statement should be well prepared but when it comes to actually writing the thing don't overdo it because it won't add an enormous amount of value if you draft and redraft and redraft and redraft and finally evidence evidence evidence don't just tell someone show them don't just say you're interested in law anthropology arabic japanese engineering give some proof you must provide some evidence if you don't it will be the easiest two minutes that an admissions tutor has reading your personal statement they will just discard it because they will think this is not a serious contender i've got a huge pile of people who not only say that they're interested in engineering they've done something about it they've read some stuff they've experienced some things they've listened to some lectures they've watched some uh online tutorials whatever they've proved it you must must must provide some proof okay don't just tell you must show and the reason i'm getting so animated is because i care about the outcome of your applications and it pains me to see someone who's obviously a strong contender throw it away by not giving sufficient proof of their motivation okay so that's that um thank you all for listening um the slides as i say are available at tinyurl.com forward slash u o o p s uh that's tinyurl.com forward slash u o o p s um i will stop sharing my screen now um and see if there's any questions but you've got to go off to various other lectures shortly so i won't uh talk too long okay um so i'll answer one of the questions and then i'll start i'll write answers longer answers to these so you can look them up a bit later um so do i need to start my personal statement with a really good opener or is it okay to say i want to study x because blah well i guess it depends on what a really good opener is um but i would have thought that just a fairly honest opening where you say i want to study x because is completely fine so i'm not going to think less of you if your opening is pretty straightforward you don't need to sort of punch me in the gut from the very get-go so i wouldn't overthink the opening i think that's something that a lot of people do is that they feel they need to come up with some sort of overture at the start that grips the readers but it's not necessary i mean to give you a concrete example there was one personal statement i read where the author said i'm going to not use the letter e at all in this entire personal statement in reference to a short novel from the early 20th century and i just thought what why why would you do that it's not impressive it's not necessary uh you're standing out but not for a particularly sort of constructive reason um so in short i would keep it simple just explain what you want to do and then you can build more impact in the main body of the personal statement when you tell us what your reflections on your uh readings were because that's when it'll suddenly elevate it to a truly personal statement i would argue anyway i better stop wittering because you've got other stuff to get to but thank you so much for watching uh do keep the questions coming i'm going to spend a bit of time now answering them so if you've got any that have not been answered then do feel free to type them up and i'll get to them as soon as possible i hope you're staying safe and well and i'll speak to you shortly thanks everyone you

Channel: Jesus College Oxford

Views: 67,865

Rating: 4.9908075 out of 5

Keywords: Personal statement, Oxford, University, UCAS, Admissions

Id: 955Z7n2L_C0

Length: 42min 46sec (2566 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 30 2020