How to Save Admissions Tutors From a Lacklustre Personal Statement

"Ever since I was a child, I have longed to study geography…" The room feels heavier. Your eyes glaze over. Inside, a little part of you wilts.

A friend of mine, an ex-Cambridge admissions interviewer, recently sent me a voice note. She sounded defeated. “It’s a sad state of affairs,” she sighed. “Writing should be a means of expression, of connection. We write because we have something to say. But now it’s all become performative pseudo-intellectualism. The A-level system has turned writing into a tick-box exercise.”

It's undeniable that the personal statement is very difficult to produce. As an applicant, you are being asked not only to make the very difficult decision of to which subject and university you want to devote yourself for the next few years, but also to explain why you have made it. You have to demonstrate passion and motivation for your chosen subject on the one hand, and 'deep engagement' and academic research on the other.

But nevertheless the competition is high, and there have never been more tools at hand to help you. At a time when you can produce a mediocre essay or personal statement as fast as you can type a ChatGPT prompt, the battle to find the specific, the idiosyncratic, and the interesting, has never been more pressing. Below are three tools - and accompanying exercises - to help you: specificity, thought, and voice.

Thought

You need to give evidence of your motivation, but you must balance this with showing your potential as first-class academic thinker. This is where sharing authentic, personal academic thought is crucial; this must go beyond simply listing what you have read and whether you agreed or not. ‘Thinking’ can helpfully be divided by direction: backwards, sideways, and forwards.

First, thinking backwards. This means deconstructing the ideas you've read or been taught. Just because a theory has been suggested by an eminent scholar, it doesn’t mean it’s flawless. Perhaps Marx’s theory of alienation seems incomplete, or Foucault’s panopticon feels less omnipresent than he imagined. You should question and challenge ideas, asking why they do or don't work.

Thinking sideways is where creativity comes into play. The best essays and personal statements we see draw connections between seemingly unrelated ideas. Maybe you see a link between genetics and the evolution of social movements, or between chaos theory and behavioural economics. These unexpected connections can be brilliant, provided they work.

Finally, thinking forwards means taking the theories you’ve read and pushing them into the future. Where could this idea lead? What comes next? How would you investigate this further? If you’re discussing psychoanalysis, for example, how might it evolve in light of modern neuroscience? Or if you’re critiquing neoliberal economics, what comes next in a world facing climate catastrophe?

Involving backwards, sideways, and forwards thinking can help you avoid repetition of the same ideas, and instead show your ability to interrogate concepts as living, evolving entities. This not only showcases your critical thinking but also demonstrates your potential as a successful undergraduate.

Voice

The third essential tool is voice. What drains essays and personal statements of life isn’t just the lack of specificity or original thought - it’s the absence of an authentic voice. You need to remember that the goal is neither mimic a textbook or an academic journal, nor to pepper your statement with insincere synonyms for ‘passionate’ (are you really ‘utterly mesmerised’ by economics?). Instead, you should be aiming to write in a way that’s distinctly yours. An essay devoid of voice may be technically correct, but it will fail to leave a lasting impression.

Voice doesn’t mean adopting a flamboyant or overly casual tone, but rather allowing the personality behind the words to breathe. This means trying to write with the same honest tone that you would use in an engaging conversation - thoughtful, clear, but unmistakably your own. After all, it’s not the subject that makes an essay memorable, it’s the perspective.

Take, for example, two applicants writing about the same scientific discovery. The first applicant writes, “The Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919, was a significant turning point in European history, primarily due to its profound impact on the geopolitical landscape of the continent.” This is factually correct but reads like a textbook. The second writes, “The Treaty of Versailles didn’t just redraw maps; it planted the seeds of resentment and instability that would ignite Europe again two decades later. I’m interested in how turning points in history reveal political failures and guide future diplomacy.” The latter student brings their perspective into the writing, speaking from a first person perspective and showing personal engagement with the subject as well as a critical understanding of its long-term impact.

Finding that balance is crucial - it allows your personality and intellectual curiosity to shine through in a way that distinguishes you from the hundreds of other essays written in identical monotonous voices.