Personal Statements – Do’s and Don’ts

Although Personal Statements are due to be scrapped in the next academic year, it’s still important

to understand what your universities would like to see you talk about in your application. Your

personal statement allows you to tell them why you’re the perfect candidate – as well

demonstrating your passion for the subject. In this blog, I’ll be talking about how to write your

personal statement, as well as some do’s and don’ts.

At my school, a personal statement was always referred to as ‘a love letter to your subject’. What do

you like about the prospect of studying your chosen subject? What have you done to show your

interest in it? To start out, write a list of anything you have done related to your subject. This could

be anything – work experience, volunteering or shadowing. Don’t worry if you haven’t done much –

you can always transform what you have done into something amazing. For healthcare, it’s

important to show you can interact with the public, so you can even include your part-time job! The

most important thing about personal statements is reflection – what did you learn from it? I initially

created a word document with a list of my work experiences and next to it, wrote 4/5 sentences

about what I learned. This made it easier for me to see where there were reoccurring themes and

also unique things I could talk about, which would make me stand out.

Even the most obvious thing, what you are studying, is important to include. To study healthcare,

you have to be academically capable, and universities like to see how you explore this further than

your curriculum. It’s important to have a balance of being scholarly and well-rounded too. If you

have competed in any Olympiads or subject competitions like the UKMT, you might want to include

this too! Aside from studying the standard subjects for medicine (Biology, Chemistry and Maths), I

also study A-Level French and explained how this has helped with my social and cultural

understanding. Think about some responsibilities you may have in or outside of school for example,

maybe being the president of a school club or being head boy/girl. These all allow you to

demonstrate the important skills of leadership and organisation.

Personal statements don’t have to follow a specific structure – write it how you like! I started

unconventionally with my hobbies: playing the piano and playing American football, instead of

including it at the end like most people would. I did this because I thought it would be a good

opening, to demonstrate how I’m well-rounded. If you are still searching for opportunities to talk

about, draft your paragraphs based on something interesting you have done, like reading a book or

listening to a podcast. I structured one of my paragraphs as a ‘learning journey’, which demonstrates

how I nurtured my interest further. I started off by talking about a summer school I did on research,

and then I spoke about how my interested in this made me reach out to shadow the clinicians doing

the clinical trials. This demonstrates this ‘learning journey’ and how you continuously learn from

your experiences. If you really do want to have some sort of structure here’s what I would

recommend:

1. Why you want to study ___ (Motivation)

2. Work experience and/or volunteering – and what you learned from it (Exploration)

3. Wider reading and study beyond your school curriculum (Oxbridge likes this) (Exploration)

4. Skills from extracurricular activities which are relevant to the skill set needed to be in this

profession (Suitability)

5. Conclusion (Motivation)

From a grammatical perspective, its important to keep things short and sweet – remember that you

only have 4000 characters and 47 lines. Avoid using scientific jargon that overcomplicates things

unless you are 100% sure about what you are talking about. Your personal statement is often used

to draw questions from during interviews, so make sure you know what you are saying. Try not to

use long sentences or complex sentences either – this just makes things less clear. Most importantly,

do not plagiarise! Universities have very intense plagiarism checkers, and it is a big offence to do so.

It’s fine to draw inspiration from excellent personal statements in terms of structure or content, but

never copy anything. These checkers can identify copied phrases as short as 3 words. Be original and

yourself – this is what they are looking for! Try to avoid using the passive voice like ‘This showed

me’, ‘This made me understand’. Instead, use phrases like ‘I understood’ and ‘I realised’.

To wrap up, here are my do’s and don’ts.

Do:

- Include your motivation about why you want to study your chosen subject – it’s nice to use

personal anecdotes if you have any

- Include your exploration – what have you done to learn about your subject? Work

experience, volunteering, wider reading or research.

- Include why you are suitable for this course – what skills do you have?

Reflection should be a big part of your personal statement. When you’re writing it, don’t just list

your placements or academic achievements and extracurricular activities – reflect on key learning

points and link everything back to qualities that are important for medicine.

Don’t:

- Give a generic or cliched reason for wanting to study this course (especially for medicine!)

- Writing about what you did without offering any reflections on what you actually learned

from the experience

- Claiming that you have a certain quality (e.g. empathy) without backing it up

If you ever want to have your personal statement checked or read by us, we are happy to do so. Just

send us an email! If you have any questions about what to write or how to write it, we also have

amazing subject leads who would be more than happy to help.