A Brush With the UCAS Personal Statement

Yet another hour on the phone with my nephew discussing his Personal Statement. For those who
graduated a long time ago, applying to university has got a whole lot more bureaucratic. Also it's online. Part of the application is the aforesaid Personal Statement, which is a 4000-character (!) essay on yourself and why you want to study whatever it is wherever it is. Only you can't tailor it university by university, so it has to be carefully neutral about the institution.

Preparing for an earlier draft, I asked the Young Folk at work what they did for their statements. My manager said he talked a lot about his extra-curricular activities - which made sense since he's that sort of person (an invaluable part of the Sports and Social Club, Fire Warden). An even younger analyst said he talked about why he liked the subject and a little bit about his pastimes, but had also put in paragraphs relating the other subjects he did at A-level to the one he wanted to study.

The Nephew has the same genetic difficulty presenting himself as I do, his mother does and all his grandparents do or did. We just don't do sharing ourselves – our thoughts and ideas, yes, but ourselves, no. (Look carefully at my entries on this blog: are they about me or are they reports of my passing thoughts and opinions?) He wants to study history and if you talk to him for ten minutes you will hear his interest in the subject. For god's sake he's read books about the early Crusades.

My only contribution has been a) editing, and b) asking questions. Plus of course patience and a little knowledge of and sympathy for the awful struggles going on inside the poor lad. I bought him 40 Successful Personal Statements: For UCAS Application, which on first pass scared the living daylights out of me and then, having realised that they teach even less grammar and writing technique than they did when I went to school, The Complete Plain Words. But then I buy everybody that.

Maybe some people can just write about themselves and why they want to study Serbo-Croat and Theoretical Physics. If you asked me what I wanted to study Mathematics and Philosophy I might have said something like “Logic”, but the simple answer was that I'd started out with Electrical Engineering (vocation) and then read some philosophy and knew that was it. It made sense to me in a way that nothing else ever had or ever has. I'm guessing that's the way my nephew feels about history. But how do you say that in boilerplate? And without opening up a question you couldn't answer? Yet it's the best answer there is.