The personal statement is the main Common Application essay, in which students have the best opportunity to let the university get to know a little more about them. It is a way to show your passion for your chosen subject and let the institution you’re applying to know you are the perfect match for their course.
A personal statement shouldn’t be taken lightly. Mostly if you are applying for admission at Oxford, Sussex, Greenwich and Bangor University then you need to be very careful with your personal statement. You may have written your statement in full, but there’s always more to be done to improve it. There are many things which you need to know to improve your personal statement.
Read these five important things for making your personal statement stand out!
Table of Contents
Apply for Right Course
One of the major problems on the personal statement is where the statement doesn’t relate to the course which you’ve applied. If you are applying for a medicine course but you then you put some random courses like engineering on the end then your personal statement will just go straight in the bin.
Very often when people are applying for more than one course they haven’t quite decided what they are going to apply for and the statement ends up falling two stools. So it’s an important thing for improving your personal statement. Try and focus on a particular course that you have chosen.
Don’t Drop the Name
Sometimes, when it comes to the personal statement there are things that students do such as they drop the name. For improving your personal statement, you are needed to be careful about your name. Don’t drop your name while writing the personal statement. When writing a personal statement, it’s important to show your passion for the subject.
Understand the Course
If you are applying for a course that doesn’t map nicely onto school curriculum you’ve got to work even harder to make it clear that you understand what the course is about. Sometimes the candidate is not particularly clear about what the degree program actually involves.
This can be for many reasons so it could be that perhaps you haven’t had the opportunity to study on a level in the sub that you are really interested in. It could be that you are picking a subject that you just think you might get into university with because of your grades perhaps won’t take you to a program of study that you would prefer to study.
OR it could be just because you haven’t done enough research about the topic that actually really does fascinate you. So, that’s vitally important to understand the course of which you are applying for.
Spelling and Grammar
The student should be very careful with spellings and grammar while writing a personal statement. Because the main thing that would put off candidate based on their personal statement as it’s badly written. In this day and age is absolutely no excuse for not running it through a spell checker so that is absolutely important to make sure that you have read you statement carefully and get there remembers family or friends to read it as well. So, that makes sure that it makes sense.
If any personal statement is laden with mistakes is that punctuation, programmer, bad sentences and structure then your statement will be rejected. Sometimes, it’s a matter of just being too close to your writing so you can be really absorbed in the writing process of putting together your personal statement.
For improving, you need to then do is put it down for few days and then come back to it because when you come back to it you have fresh eyes and you are probably likely to see any if the errors that you might have made. Give yourself some distance and go back one idea per sentence one major idea in any given paragraph that you are writing and keep these writing skills in mind, when you come to create your personal statement.
Each paragraph should discuss a different topic, so that, as a whole, your personal statement reads in a clear and fluid way.
Research
The most important thing that you need to do before you even begin to write your personal statement is to start researching the courses you want to apply for. For this, you need to start using your skills as an online detective.
You need to start looking at the online prospectuses. Although you should demonstrate your knowledge of the course – and how you’ve already started relevant research and reading – there’s no need for you to talk about everything you’ve ever read that may be slightly relatable.
Conclusion
An amazing personal statement isn’t going to guarantee a spot in the freshman class, but it can positively impact a student’s application. While a poor personal statement can, along with other elements, really hurt a student’s chances of gaining admission. Students really need to put a lot of effort into writing a great essay in order to enhance their chances of admission.
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