Personal Statement



When making your application to university perhaps the most important part is the personal statement.

This section gives you the opportunity to really sell yourself and show admissions why you are suitable for the course, and to talk about your past achievements in college and school. They can often be the deciding factor on your application as to whether you are successful.  So it is worth taking your time over it and researching what you should include.

Try to plan out beforehand what you want to include.  You may find that you have a list as long as your arm of achievements to put down.  However, this is not advised as you need to keep the reader engaged and interested in what you have to say.  Break down what you want to include to the most important facts, and discard those that are not relevant.

Within your personal statement you will need to talk about the course you want to study, why you want to study it, the qualities and attributes that make you a suitable person to study the course, and any other interests or skills you can link to the course.

The personal statement will be a maximum of 4000 words long, and you should always make sure that you back up what you have written on a memory stick or similar.  It would also be a good idea to write the statement out in MS Word before transferring it to the UCAS application form so that you can run a spellchecker on the text.

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