The Ultimate Guide to writing your personal statement in the summer holidays

When should I start working on my personal statement?

Now! It is never too early to start working on your personal statement, especially for Oxbridge. This doesn’t mean you should necessarily start drafting straight away, but no one ever regretted doing too much reading for their application.

What background work should I be doing for my personal statement?

Anything academic that relates to your course is perfect material for a personal statement. Oxbridge admissions tutors are highly focused on your academics rather than your extracurricular interests. It is best to show depth rather than breadth, as depth gives you the opportunity to show mastery of an area of academic study as well as a strong personal interest in the field.

How should I organise my reading for my personal statement?

We recommend using a ‘snowball technique’ to reading and background work. Think of a book, article or lecture that you read recently and found interesting. Think about which bit of it you found interesting, or was there an area of the subject which you had not heard of before. Then look for a book, article or lecture on that topic and repeat the cycle again. In this way you should be able to slowly more around an academic discipline with a few ‘peaks’ of immense knowledge.

Using this technique means that when you sit down to write a personal statement it should be very easy. You can just write about what books you read, what you thought of them and how that led you onto the next topic.

How should I structure my personal statement?

At University Admissions Tutors, we usually recommend imagining structuring your personal statement as an essay entitled “why you should let me into your university”. This means you should structure it as you would that essay. This means starting with a short punchy paragraph briefly outlining what attracts you to your chosen course.

The next section is the main bulk of your personal statement. Here you want to weave together a narrative about your reading (or other extracurricular studies) and what you thought of the books you’ve read. This is the part where you really want to show off what you’ve read and your ability to critically analyse the field.

We then recommend a sentence or two outlining some extracurricular activities before concluding with a brief paragraph again explaining how what you’ve just written would make you a good fit for your course.