Personal Statement Guidebook: Examples and Advice for Top University Entry
Unlock your path to university success with our “Personal Statement Guidebook: Examples and Advice for Top University Entry.” This comprehensive guide offers expert advice, detailed sections, and real examples to help you craft a compelling personal statement that stands out to top universities.
Learn the dos and don’ts of personal statement writing, explore step-by-step guidance, and gain insights from admissions professionals. Whether you’re aiming for medical and life sciences, physical and mathematical sciences, social sciences, languages and literature, humanities, or the arts, our guidebook has you covered. Download your free copy now and start your journey to academic excellence.
In this resource you will find Medicine personal statement examples, annotated to guide you on good and bad practice. Alongside our Medicine personal statement examples, we have put together a guide on how to write a personal statement for medical school. A Medicine personal statement should reflect your intellectual curiosity about the field. In writing a personal statement for medical school, you should try to present yourself as individual and not a series of achievements and grades.
The handy guide below accompanies our Medicine personal statement examples to help you with all the key areas you should cover to make a strong application to study Medicine.
For any university course you apply to, the Personal Statement allows you to demonstrate your academic capabilities and convey your interest in the subject, as well as showing why you are a suitable applicant. For Medicine, however, a fantastic Personal Statement is essential due to the extremely high competition for places.
In this chapter, we explain the purpose of the Personal Statement and how it can influence your application. We also provide a guide to planning, writing and proofing which will help you to begin the process of putting together an excellent statement.
A strong application for Medicine to any UK university requires you to excel at every stage of the process – including your personal statement. Although a strong personal statement is not enough to secure a place on its own, it can go a long way towards a successful application, and is definitely necessary for success. The statement can help you at interview, as it discloses your intellectual and medical interests to Admissions Tutors, which in some cases will form part of the interview discussion in both traditional and MMI interviews.
You should view everything you say in your personal statement as a potential springboard for discussion at interview.
You may be asked to elaborate on something you have written about, be it a book, work experience, particular areas of academic interest, or an extended project. With many universities using the MMI format, it is not uncommon for a whole station (i.e. a section of the assessment) to be based on your personal statement.
A previous candidate for Medicine at Oxbridge stated:
“We discussed action potentials, haemoglobin, cardiac output, respiratory systems, hormones, the liver, mental health… nothing was asked out of the blue – it all led from what I had said in my personal statement, or stemmed from a graph.”
Even if you are not overtly asked about your personal statement at interview, the preparation that goes into researching and writing it will give you the knowledge and confidence to talk about and explore new ideas within your subject, which will only help to make your application stronger.
You can only submit one personal statement through UCAS, so it will be read by Admissions Tutors at all the universities you apply to. Applicants for Medicine can apply for a maximum of four Medicine courses, but also have the option of applying for a fifth non-Medicine course.
The personal statement needs to show your dedication and commitment to Medicine, but at the same time you can also ensure it has some relevance to your fifth-choice course. For example, if you choose to apply for Pharmacy as your fifth choice, you can include a sentence on drugs and medicine.
It is important to consider how much content you include not relating directly to the medical course you are applying for. Oxford and Cambridge, for instance, are not particularly interested in whether you are a gifted athlete or play instruments to Grade 8 standard. They do, of course, recognise the scale of such accomplishments, and they can indicate characteristics that will boost academic success. Ultimately, however, the Admissions Tutors reading your statement care about one thing: how much potential do you have as a medical student? Other universities are often more interested in students as ‘well-rounded’ people, where your extracurricular activities are of value. As such, it is a good idea to include these, but make sure to state how these extracurricular activities will help you to become an excellent medical student and doctor.
If you are applying to Oxbridge, you must strongly weight your statement towards subject-specific content.
While you can only submit one personal statement through UCAS and the universities you apply to, there is one exception. Applicants to Durham have the option of submitting a ‘substitute personal statement’, which allows you to submit a separate personal statement to Durham directly following your UCAS application.
If you choose to do so, the Admissions Tutors at Durham will then disregard your UCAS personal statement and only read the submitted substitute statement. This substitute has exactly the same requirements as the normal statement (i.e. 4000 characters) and must be submitted within three days of receiving Durham’s email acknowledging their receipt of your application.
For Cambridge applicants, the Supplementary Application Questionnaire (SAQ) provides you with the opportunity to elaborate on your motivation for applying to your chosen course, as well as further information about your grades. One part of the SAQ, for example, requires you to submit your individual module marks in AS and/or A-levels.
As part of the SAQ, you have the opportunity to write an additional statement, which Admissions Tutors consider in addition to your UCAS personal statement. This is your chance to mention anything you have not been able to include in your UCAS personal statement, including further reading or more detail on your extended essay or EPQ. The SAQ must be completed by all UK and EU applicants by the deadline of 22nd October (one week after the 15th October UCAS deadline). You will receive an email with the details you need to complete the SAQ form once you have submitted your UCAS form. If you are submitting a COPA you will not need to fill in the entirety of the SAQ, but will need to complete your UCAS ID number and COPA Reference Number to submit.
Making an application to Oxford or Cambridge can seem like a complex process. Unlike most other UK universities, applying to Oxbridge requires your knowledge of different deadlines and requirements: college choice decisions, factoring in admissions test deadlines, even applying to UCAS by a different date than everyone else.
In addition to these significant differences, applicants to Oxford or Cambridge also have to consider Oxbridge bursary deadlines and choral and organ scholarship deadlines if relevant.
To simplify this process, we have put together all the key Oxbridge application dates and deadlines for 2022-2023 applicants in this calendar. Use it to see when significant deadlines for the application process occur and help you to plan your Oxbridge preparation.
Once students have understood the important dates, they will need to plan out their preparation across the application cycle. For a full, tailored plan of action for preparation, as well as all of the research and information students need to make sure they are putting forward an application that represents their full potential, students can book an appointment with one of our Senior Consultants for a Private Consultation.
For many (though not all) subjects at both Oxford and Cambridge, you will have to take an admissions test as part of your application, and your score will contribute to your chances of success.
In general, Oxford interviews fewer people than Cambridge, so the admissions tests are more important in shortlisting candidates to invite to interview. On the other hand, Cambridge, maintaining its high interview rate, seems to put less emphasis on the admissions test scores prior to interview (however, the ENGAA (Engineering Admissions Assessment) and the TSAC (Thinking Skills Assessment Chemistry) seem to be exceptions to this ). This means that by and large, if you are applying to Oxford, it’s especially important that you aim for top marks in your admissions test.
Below, we’ve illustrated how two different faculties use their admissions test to shortlist candidates:
The pre-interview shortlist score is a combination of the HAT (History Aptitude Test) score and your contextualised GCSE score, with the HAT weighted at 70%. The aim is that each college should interview three candidates for every place, so the pre-interview shortlisting process is intended to achieve this number. The History faculty advises colleges not to invite for interview candidates scoring below a designated cutoff score, which varies from year to year. However, colleges may “rescue” candidates from below the cutoff score if they have Access or Widening Participation flags, or for extenuating circumstances stated on their UCAS application.
Applicants for English will take the ELAT (English Literature Aptitude Test), with each candidate receiving a score out of 60 and being sorted into four bands on the basis of this score. The score is used in pre-interview ranking and can also be used for deciding between candidates.
Band one identifies those candidates who should definitely be called for interview unless other indicators strongly suggest otherwise, whereas band four identifies candidates who are unlikely to be invited, unless other factors outweigh the test result. In pre-interview ranking, the ELAT score is weighted at 40% of the overall deciding factors.
Along with admissions test scores, GCSE grades are a major element of the pre-interview selection process, and the importance of GCSEs should not be underestimated. This is especially the case under the new A-level system whereby most applicants will not have taken AS exams, meaning that GCSEs are the only concrete qualifications that the average applicant will have when they apply. This also means that if you have slightly weaker GCSE grades but you already have achieved strong A-level results – for example if you are applying after a gap year – these may help compensate.
Some faculties, such as the Oxford History faculty, choose not to consider A-levels or predictions in their official pre-interview shortlist score, because they only use criteria that apply to all applicants. However, the faculty-wide shortlist score does not determine whether you are offered a place as the decision is made by the individual colleges which will take into account many aspects of your application, including A-levels. The purpose of the ranking is rather to give Admissions Tutors an idea of where the applicants to their college fall within the context of all the History applicants that year.
An example of a faculty that does take predicted and achieved A-levels into account for pre-interview assessment is Chemistry at Oxford, which gives each candidate a mark from one to five based on A-levels or equivalent (achieved/predicted), AS (if applicable), GCSEs or equivalent, and the teacher reference.
On average Cambridge makes higher offers than Oxford, requiring more A*s at A-level. As they are less selective than Oxford pre-interview, the high offers allow them to whittle down their numerous candidates post-interview. They also tend to make more personalised offers than Oxford, meaning that for some subjects you cannot be entirely sure until you receive your offer what grades will be required at A-level. This is something to bear in mind if your A-level grades or predicted grades are strong but not outstanding.
Note: some schools do not predict A*s as a matter of policy. If this is the case with your school, make sure that it is mentioned in the teacher reference.
For some subjects, especially if there is no admissions test, you will be required to submit written work as part of your application. Although written work is often overlooked by candidates, it is a vital piece of the application for many subjects. In the Oxford English faculty for example, the written work score makes up 40% of the pre-interview assessment, whilst GCSEs make up only 17.5%.
Written work should take the form of school or college work written as part of your course, and should be marked by a teacher. Rules may vary between faculties but the Oxford university guidelines state that each piece should be around 2,000 words long, and should not be re-written or corrected after it has been marked. In Cambridge not all colleges require written work for a particular subject, so check the requirements for your first choice college.
Written work may be officially assessed according to a number of criteria if it is used in pre-interview shortlisting. The assessment criteria for written work in the Oxford English faculty include:
literary sensibility
sensitivity to creative use of language
evidence of careful and critical reading
coherence of argument
originality
Since written work is a tutor’s opportunity to see how you structure arguments and what kind of work you might be submitting at university, it is important to submit pieces that show you at your best. As the submitted pieces must be taken from your school work, make sure you work hard on your A-level essays and aim to get high marks so you have a strong selection to choose from.
As you put together your university application, the UCAS personal statement is one of the main things you will be focusing on. In terms of pre-interview selection, faculties which operate a pre-interview score and ranking system tend not to include the personal statement in this ranking. However, as we have already seen, such rankings do not make or break an application, and college Admissions Tutors are free to take all factors into account.
The personal statement, as the name suggests, is the only truly personal element of your application; it is your opportunity to make an impression on Admissions Tutors as an individual and to convey your passion for the subject. Remember that tutors aren’t just looking for applicants with good grades, but applicants with a demonstrable interest in and aptitude for the subject who will make engaging students – the UCAS statement is your chance pre-interview to show that you are such an applicant.
The good news is that whilst GCSE grades cannot be changed and admissions test scores depend on your performance in one exam, the personal statement can be tweaked and worked on as often as you like before you submit it, and you can ask for feedback from others. If your grades aren’t as high as they could be, make sure you put extra effort into your personal statement so you stand out and make admissions tutors want to interview you.
Download the example personal statement on the rightWritten by a successful applicant who has now graduated from Oxbridge, this personal statement is annotated by its author, with all the insights hindsight can bring.
For further information on writing your personal statement, see our personal statement ‘first steps’ guide.
What is the SAQ?
The Cambridge Supplementary Application Questionnaire is an additional piece of your application to Cambridge. It is designed so that Cambridge has consistent information from every applicant, beyond the details provided in the UCAS form. It also allows Cambridge to ask questions not required by UCAS, such as details of module marks in AS examinations.
Format of the SAQ
There are eight sections of the SAQ, divided into Application Type, Photograph, Personal Details, BMAT Number, Education, Qualifications, Additional Information and Submit. All of these sections will be fully explained in the form and should not cause any difficulty or worry.
Additional personal statement
Section seven, Additional Information, includes an additional personal statement. Whether you fill this in or not is optional, but it can be a great opportunity to talk specifically about why you want to study the course you have applied for at Cambridge. This section must be a maximum of 1200 characters including spaces.
A frequent worry when submitting a personal statement for UCAS is the inability to tailor it to Cambridge specifically, as it will be used across your applications to all universities. The brilliant thing about the SAQ is that only Cambridge will see it, and so it can be completely tailored to the specific course for which you are applying.
When do I have to complete the SAQ?
For the past three academic years, the deadline for applicants to submit their SAQ has been October 22nd. The deadline is shared by international students who have already completed the COPA.
You will know when to fill out the form as Cambridge will send an email within 48 hours of submitting your UCAS form, asking you to fill out the SAQ online by the deadline.
It is usually filled out online, although you can contact Cambridge’s Admissions Office directly for a solution if this is a problem for you, either via telephone + 44 (0) 1223 333308 or email [email protected]. The Admissions Office will also answer any queries regarding logging in to the SAQ site.
Completing the SAQ is a very straightforward process with the right understanding of what is required of you. Ensure you read through the instructions carefully, fill out the SAQ by the deadline, and ask Cambridge if you find anything difficult or are unsure of any aspect of the form at any stage. Cambridge University have a comprehensive guide for filling in the SAQ here.
Download the example personal statement on the rightWritten by a successful applicant who has now graduated from Oxbridge, this personal statement is annotated by its author, with all the insights hindsight can bring.
Get top tips from our Oxbridge-graduates and fill in our workbook to narrow down the areas of strength you should focus on in your personal statement. Use the structure provided in the workbook to help guide the structure of your writing.
Download our comprehensive personal statement workbook and get extra support while you write.
Download the example personal statement on the rightWritten by a successful applicant who has now graduated from Oxbridge, this personal statement is annotated by its author, with all the insights hindsight can bring.
For further information on writing your personal statement, see our personal statement ‘first steps’ guide.
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