How to write a good Personal Statement

Hi! I’m Charlie, and I am a first year biologist. I come from a town near Liverpool that doesn’t have many Oxbridge students each year. Since starting at Oxford, I have joined the Oxford cheerleading team The Sirens, and joined the Harry Potter society. I’m only a couple weeks into my first term, so I can’t comment yet exactly on my life at Oxford, but here are some useful tips which will hopefully improve your personal statement for Oxford, Cambridge, or any other university you apply for.

BE INTERESTING
The tutor will read loads of statements that day. Make yours stand out. If your statement is boring, repetitive, and doesn’t show much interest in the subject you’re applying for, the statement just simply won’t be memorable, and the tutor will be less likely to be impressed. You want your statement to read ‘WOW! Let’s give them a place!’, not ‘Oh, this again’. A key example will be your first opening sentence. Make the tutor want to read on. So many statements begin with ‘I want to do this subject because’, and that simply isn’t interesting or memorable. Try an insightful comment, or a small sentence about what first caught your eye about that subject, and expand on how it wanted to make you learn more. My first sentence was ‘Watching Planet Earth at a young age and admiring the vast variety of plants and animals featured was probably the first clue I had about my passion for biology’. This gives an opening statement about what got me into biology in the first place, and then I can go on discussing what I did to learn more.

BE HONEST
This one is so simple. If you didn’t go to tea with the prime minister, please just don’t say you did. If you make it to the interview stage, the tutors might ask you about your personal statement, and it becomes so clear if you mention something on your statement that you didn’t do. The tutors understand that not everyone has the same opportunities. If someone else did have tea with the prime minister, they won’t mark you down just because you didn’t.

BE INFORMATIVE
You only have 4,000 characters to write your entire personal statement. It feels like a lot, but it’s honestly not - don’t waste them! 4,000 characters is approximately an A4 page of writing, and you want to use that page to convince the tutors to give you a university place. The tutors don’t want to know what your friend did, they want to know what you did. Also, try and keep your personal statement subject-orientated. Try and aim for a few distinct paragraphs and aim for only one of these paragraphs to not be subject-specific, usually the paragraph at the end (approximately 20%). The English tutor does not want to read a full page about your time as a tap dancer. Obviously, extracurriculars can give you great skills that will be beneficial to your subject, and can be useful skills that can prove that uni life is for you, but if you didn’t gain these skills doing something subject-specific, then aim for featuring them in your relatively brief ‘extracurriculars’ paragraph only.

BE SPECIFIC
As mentioned in the previous point, 4,000 characters isn’t really a lot. Make sure everything you put has a point to it. The tutors don’t care all that much about what you actually did, again they understand that not everyone has the same opportunities, they care about what you got out of it. When writing your personal statement, keep asking yourself ‘so what?’ after every single point, to encourage yourself to include all the skills you got out of it. Maybe the lecture you attended inspired you to read more about that topic and you found out you had a real passion for it? Maybe the work experience you did enhanced your communication skills? Has it made you consider working in that field in the future, and doing this course at university will help you achieve that goal? Make sure you give every point you make a reason why the university should accept you.

BE YOU
This is YOUR personal statement. No one else’s. This is not the time to be modest, you’ve got to put your persuasive shoes on, and sell yourself. If you want that place at university, then fight for it. Give the university no reason to reject you. This is a big step in your life, and you want to make it the best it can possibly be. Do what is best for you, and get in there and succeed! Good luck in your personal statement writing!

Charlie Lamb is a first-year Biology student