UCAS - how do you write a personal statement?

It's that time of year again - at my old school students started back this week and even though I'm missing that back-to-school feeling (which is really weird, I leave in a week eeeek!) I remember only too well how I felt last year at this point in the UCAS application process for medicine. It's likely that you might be lucky and come from a big school in the UK, where quite a few students are applying for medicine, so that you have people going through the same thing to empathize with you. I was the only person in my VI form applying to study UK medicine, and it sucked. If you do have classmates going through the same thing, get talking! Sharing experiences and ideas can only help the both of you throughout the application process.

Anyway, if you haven't started or finished already, this is the time for you to begin your personal statement! What is that, you ask? A collection of paragraphs comprising 4000 characters or less in which you attempt to convince admissions tutors who have been reading thousands of personal statements trying to do the same thing as you that you are the candidate they should consider for a place or interview, even though they've never met you, or seen your face. Sounds fun, right?

The toughest part is definitely getting started. A helpful tool to set you off is to have a mooch around the website of your top choice university and see whether they have any guidance on personal statement structure, as each uni differs slightly in what they expect in a personal statement. Oxford is a good example - I used their medicine statement template to help me get started on mine. I'll post segments of mine here in a minute (bearing in mind that this blog gets a lot of views, and universities know it exists, and plagiarism could void your application ;) ). What I did to start off was to make lists. First, I made a list of reasons why I want to do medicine. This is very important, as from the offset you should be asking yourself this! If the only answer that you can come up with is 'for the money' or 'because my parent/s are doctors' or 'I want to help people' then you are going for the wrooooooonnggggg degree. I'll explain more about that later when I write about interview questions! Really think hard about the base reasons why you want to do this. If you come to the point where you honestly can't think of any, and you're not even sure if you really want this at all, then you should reconsider your application. I'm saying this to spare you a lot of difficulty and heartache later, haha!

The next list you make should be one of your achievements. If you got particularly good grades in a set of exams, or received an award for your exam grades, put this down, and think about any other exams you might have taken in extra-curriculars such as singing or music. Have you achieved anything noteworthy in sport or drama, or any other hobby? Have you done any part-time work? Stick it aaaaaaall down. Everything. :)

Then after that, make a list of things you'd like to achieve in your career, and things that you have done to research into a career in medicine (not only, but primarily, your work experience). Then make a list of things you LEARNED during said work experience, and by that I don't mean just the procedures you saw. You need to describe how these procedures affected the patient, and what you learnt about medical practice.

Done that? GOOD. ;)

Okay, now I'm going to go into personal statement structure. You must bear in mind when reading this that originality is THE most valuable thing you can have on a UCAS application, so these tips are ONLY a guide - please run with them and make them your own!