Hi and welcome to Bath's Teams Conversations. This will involve me and a
couple of ambassadors discussing various topics around university such as what is
university, looking at applying and choosing a university, as well as talking
about what life is like at the University of Bath.
In this video we'll
be talking about personal statements. This will include the type of content
that you might want to put inside your personal statement, what sort of
activities to talk about, as well as how to structure your personal statement and
how to actually go about writing it. We hope you find this video useful.
I'm Callie Rice and I'm the Student Recruitment Assistant here at the
University of Bath but I myself was a student for four years at Bath as well
so I've been through the process as well, but I wrote my personal statement back
in about 2015 so quite a while ago. I studied biology as my undergraduate
degree. Do you guys want to introduce yourselves?
Hi I'm Mackyla, I study social sciences here at the University and I'm in my third
year and currently on placement.
Hi I'm Vicky, I'm a third-year chemical
engineering student.
Hi I'm Georgie, I study modern languages with
European studies and I'm in my third year doing my year abroad.
How did you
structure your personal statement? Did you have a particular structure in mind
or did you just kind of slap a load of things on paper and just kind of go with
it? How did you go about ordering your personal statement?
When I wrote my person statement it was quite
easy for me just because I knew exactly
what I was applying for so I knew the structure that I wanted.
I had the academic side of things, I had work experience and then
extracurricular activities, so I separated it in those three categories.
Obviously I started with the academic side. I did start with the cliche
quote unfortunately! But that's because I studied philosophy so I felt it was
okay and acceptable. But probably don't do the cliche stuff if that is
one tip! So I started with the academic side, just said what I was
interested in and how my studies related to the
degree that I wanted to study. Then I moved on to work experience.
I have been working since I was 15 so I basically
just linked every single job I've had to the social sciences because I
had people-facing jobs. I worked in a supermarket,
a fast-food restaurant and then a pub so I just related that to social sciences.
Then I moved onto extracurricular activities. I sing and
I had a few other hobbies and then I linked those to social sciences as well.
Obviously you don't have to link everything so social sciences. If you have
a general thing that you're quite proud of then definitely mention that as well.
I think mine was quite similar. I went to loads of different workshops at
universities for open days and read a bit about it online. I was bit
confused but in school we had a workshop on how to do it
and it was the introduction and then it was why do you want to do
this and then examples of how you have shown you're interested in it, so work
experience, I did some competitions, I read some books, I
went to some events and I wrote about specific examples. The thing I
took away most from doing a personal statement was that they told me to write
specific examples of what you did and how it relates to your degree
like you said. But it was hard because I didn't really know what chemical
engineering was so it was hard to find examples of how it would fit.
That's generally how I did it.
I agree, I think definitely
making sure everything's really relevant, especially because it's
quite short, you don't have much space.
Also making sure with everything you write,
you're not just writing a list of what you've done, you're explaining why is that
relevant or what did that show you or why does that mean that you would be
really good at studying this degree or why does that mean that you have a
quality that you think could make you really good at
doing this kind of job. I think doing research is
really important through looking at the degree and what you'll be required to do.
Also research the university, are they looking for a specific candidate?
What advice do they give on personal
statements? I know that Bath have a page that applicants can look at.
Admissions have set out stuff that they would be looking for so
I think that it's really helpful to look at that and maybe go to open days and
speak to admissions because they're gonna be the ones reading your
personal statement.
Yeah I definitely agree with that. I went
to open days and they said exactly what you said
about writing specifically what you're interested in and how you've
done that or that you're curious to learn more about it. I mean they just
want to know that you have actually read about it and they weren't just
subjects that you didn't know about.
Yeah and that you're not making it up.
They want to know that you are interested in it and you read this book and want to know more.
If your subject has an interview
make sure you actually read the book! I had one
interview and it wasn't for Bath because my course doesn't really interview.
I was so nervous, I read my personal statement about seven times, I was
like 'I have to make sure I know everything inside out.' But also I would
say going back to the writing I think I wrote a couple of drafts and I gave
it to people to look at. I would also say obviously everyone has
their own writing style and opinions when it comes to personal
statements and you kind of have to prioritise who you give it to. For
example I gave mine to a careers advisor and their specialty is in
writing personal statement so I'd take a lot of their advice but if I gave
it to friends or family friends that aren't sure about
university sometimes it can be a bit conflicting, so I think trying to balance
that was quite hard.
I think it really helped
reading it out loud to your family just to make sure that it makes sense,
that it flows and that you're getting all of your points across clearly, so that
was something that was important for me and obviously again showing it to your
careers advisor and just taking all the help that is available.
I guess also maybe
other than talking about the academic side and about your work experience I
think that universities also do want to see a little bit about your
personality and that you're an all-rounder and
extracurricular I think is also quite important, so it's kind of not just the
fact that I'm really really passionate about this particular degree.
They want to know that you're involved with other stuff and how that also links to why you
would be suited university life and that you'd enjoy that
style of learning and being in that kind of environment.
Yeah there's definitely some good tips there.
So things like making several drafts because nobody's going to have it
perfect the first time that's for sure. I know mine was a bit of a mess the
first time, I just kind of slapped everything onto a piece of paper and it
really wasn't a personal statement at all, it was just kind of a list of things
that I'd done and how it relates to the course, what skills I'd gained, that
kind of thing. Another tip there is to show people,
maybe read it out loud. Find out how other people look at it definitely, it could be
teachers, it could just be your family because at the end of the day for these
universities it's going to be a really important thing for them so if you've
got little grammatical mistakes or it just doesn't sound very good, it's
very clunky, it's just not going to look very good on your behalf. So if you can
get other people to look at it, even if it's not someone who's academic in that
area, it's still better to have people read over it than to not have anyone
look over at all. Don't feel like that's a really embarrassing thing to do
because everybody does it and everybody writes a personal statement. Even if
you haven't written a personal statement you've probably written a CV or a cover
letter or something. So there's no need to feel so cringe about it or
anything. So do you guys have any other tips that you can share, maybe
things you would recommend or things to avoid potentially?
Avoiding cliches. You want to make your personal statement
really personal so if
you're using a cliche then that's not very specific to you.
You want to show admissions about
yourself so make it unique.
You want it to stand out and not just write what everybody would write.
What would you class as cliche?
I don't know maybe something 'I've
wanted to do this degrees ever since I was a child,'
because I mean it might be true and if it's true maybe do you use it.
But maybe showing the actual true journey and what has led you to your
decision as to why this is the right degree choice for you is better.
Yeah I've seen
some statistics and there's the most commonly used first sentences
and they're usually something like 'since I was a child I have wanted to do this' or
'I've always wanted to study this,' so those are actually very cliche and
there are thousands of students that write those kind of things every year
and it's not very helpful when your admissions tutor is reading a
personal statement and it starts with that line again, it's not a
great way to start because it's kind of like 'oh god another one of these,'
instead of something like 'oh this is interesting,
I want to read more about this.' So if you can I guess avoid that kind of thing,
that's a good one. Any other cliches people might think about?
Probably don't repeat yourself. So although you might have a huge
achievement, you only need to mention it once. Obviously it's a
short piece of writing so you need to include everything so make sure you only
mention the big achievements once and then move on to everything else.
Yeah I guess again with repetition as well, in your UK application you already write
what subjects you're studying and some people write 'oh I'm studying
chemistry, maths and English.' You don't need to write that because they can
already see that and like you said it's limited on space so don't repeat
yourself both in the personal statement and things
that might be elsewhere. Also, if there's something you have
done at school and a teacher can write about in the reference it might be
better to get them to write it rather than have it in yours and use more space.
And again if they're already writing that don't repeat it in your personal
statement because they can already see that elsewhere.
Yeah and I think being
really specific is important. If for example you
have an optional module in your course, say that you're interested in this optional
module or say something that you want to do in the future like a job or an
area. I think it just shows potential. So just be specific and
authentic I guess.
Yeah definitely.
Maybe also consider the tone and how
it reads. So for example you might have a structure but you want it to
flow as well and read as a nice piece of writing. Having that
transition from paragraph to paragraph I think is quite important so that it
flows nicely and it's not disjointed,
that someone reading it would think it all links together and
completely understand it.
Definitely I think that goes back to Mackyla's point
about reading it out loud. It's nice to have that flow and a good way to
test that is to just read it out loud or have someone read it out maybe to
you as well because you might read it in one way but somebody who doesn't know
much about you might read it in a completely different way. So yeah I guess
those two points can link together quite nicely. So for
universities this is probably the most important thing about your application
because you'll be up against students who have similar grades to you, they'll
be studying similar subjects and it's the personal statement that really is going
to make you stand out from similar students especially when you're in
a near-miss application as well where you're missing out on a grade and
there's maybe like five spaces left but there's 20 students that have missed out
by one grade, who are they going to give that space to, that sort of thing. So if
this is so important what would you say are the main messages you put across in
your personal statement?
Just be yourself.
Yeah I guess you are trying to say why you would be really good for this
degree so I guess bring that across and bring across the fact that you
really want this and that you are really passionate about the subject but
also that you've got qualities that would mean that you would
really enjoy it and that you feel like you would be good at it. I
think it's really important to get that across.
Yeah and I would
agree with everything that's been said. Try to make it
a bit balanced. For my personal application I think I did it
more academic but I think it's important like you said to talk about all your
extracurricular activities as well because then they can see how you would fit in general to the
university. Your extracurricular activities probably have some
transferable skills that are always useful. So like an equal
distribution of what you're doing with loads of examples of
what you do. If you do a summer school definitely include that
or have read a book, anything that you think would relate to your course.
Well thank you very much for listening to our Teams Bath Conversation.
Today we talked
about personal statements, a little bit about what we wrote in ours and the
structure, and some tips that we have. Of course we're not all experts here, we're
just talking about our own personal experiences but hopefully you found that
useful. Otherwise thank you again for listening and we'll see you again next time.