Your time to shine!

Your personal statement is your time to shine and there is a lot of information you’ll need to fit in to give the admissions tutors an overall picture of what you’re like as a student and person. The most basic things your personal statement needs to say is why you want to study your subject, and how have your education, extra-curricular activities, and life experiences helped to prove your passion and commitment to your course. This might not seem like a lot but you’ll need to go into as much detail as you can to really demonstrate any skills, experience, and talents that you may have that relate to your subject.

Remember, competition for university places is high, so now is not the time to be modest! With all the things you need to include in your personal statement you might think that you’ll have pages and pages to tell the admission tutors your entire life story, but in reality you don’t.

The UCAS website gives you a maximum of 47 lines, or 4000 characters, to say everything you need to say. Before you start writing this might seem like a lot, but once you start listing everything you’ve done and why you love your chosen degree subject you’ll realise it isn’t a lot of room at all.

If you’re running out of room then think about the course you’re studying. For example, with a course like Medicine going into detail about your work experience is vital. If you’re studying a course like English then this isn’t so important so give a rough picture of work you’ve done and save the words for more relevant elements of your personal statement.

If you’ve got to the end of your personal statement and you’re far short of the 47 line limit then go back and make sure you’ve said everything there is to say. 47 lines might be the maximum but it should also act as a guide. If you’ve managed to squeeze everything into 20 lines then you might have missed out something important.