Personal Statements: What to expect?
One of the biggest mistakes that a lot of students make, is that they assume that writing their personal statement will look something like this:
Write about me!
Proofread!
Submit!
And then they get stuck! Because what' does ‘write about me’ or ‘write personal statement’ even mean? How much time do you need to give yourself? And where do you begin?
In reality, writing your personal statement is a lot easier if you break this down into a minimum of 10 much more manageable steps - something like this:
Read about Personal Statements
Decide what questions to try to answer
Write answers to questions
Proofread
Pull together as a single piece of work
Major rewrite to make it flow
Proofread again
Feedback from teachers, tutors, friends
Make changes incorporating feedback
Proofread/Feedback cycle again
Submit to UCAS!
Advice on the process
With everything you do, the most important advice you can get is that you should start early.
Don’t leave it too late to begin or you won’t be able to thoroughly check your work. Your teachers will be able to help check personal statements, unless they get everyone’s statement on their desk two days before the deadline. If you wan't thorough feedback hand your statement in as early as you can in September - they’ll have a lot more time to spend on it that way.
Don’t panic about the blank page - write something! Chances are, what you write will be barely recognisable in your final personal statement - that doesn’t matter - just get rid of the blank page.
Don’t underestimate how important it is to know why you’re writing what you are. It can be really tempting to just ‘get on with it’ because your school tells you to do a personal statement without bothering to think about why you’re even being asked.
