 Hello and welcome to this video about personal statements. This video is suitable for all prospective undergraduate students who are applying to university and as part of their application will be writing a personal statement. My name is Dan, I work at Sir Ash University of London. Today we'll be looking at what a personal statement is and then I'll tell you who reads the personal statement. I'll then give you some advice about what you might want to include and avoid and we can think about structure for your statements and then I'll leave you with some further information and links. So what is a personal statement? Well it's one part of your overall UCAS application. This part of your application is the section that you can write that you can personalize and customize to allow yourself to stand out. This is really your opportunity to promote yourself using your own words. So this part of your personal statement really is your opportunity to actually tell us who the person is behind the overall application. Most of the application will be information about you and your grades, where you went to school etc but this allows you to explain why you think you're suitable for the courses you're applying for and you're looking here to persuade the universities you're applying to to offer you a place. It's important you know some of the practicalities of the personal statement too. You are limited in how much you can write whichever of these you hit first. So 4,000 characters or 47 lines of text in the personal statement application box. It's also important to know that in the application box where you submit your personal statement it won't allow or process any formatting such as bold, italics or underline. So that's something to be avoided. On top of this you'll probably also want to avoid any non-standard characters in case they don't quite translate into the application box. A common example here is the pound sign for currency. If you write that it will actually convert in the application box to GBP for great British pounds and that might take up more of your characters than you're expecting. So that's something to be aware of too. UCAS have got a whole list of information around the things that can't be submitted and on the final slide it'll be on one of my links. So if you do want to look at this further you can check that out at the end. Something else to bear in mind that there's also no spell checker. So if I were you before you submit your personal statement into the application box I'd probably write it in a word processor that will allow you to do any spelling punctuation and grammar checking as well using some of those inbuilt facilities. It's still a good idea to actually proofread your personal statement because sometimes things won't get picked up but you can use those tools in something like a word processor and when you're getting started you might find it helpful to use the personal statement builder tool. This is available in the UCAS hub and you can see a screenshot of it on the right hand side and this will help give you an idea of how you might like to structure your personal statement and think about some of the things to include. It's also important to bear in mind who at the university will be reading your personal statement. So as there are two main audiences and this is similar for many universities you have admissions tutors and admissions staff. Admissions tutors are academics they're experts in the subject they know it like the back of their hand it's what they're dealing with every day and they're actually the people that could be teaching you in the future if you join the university. Therefore they really want to know about your interest in the subject where that came from and that you'll be someone who's really passionate about studying that subject and you'll be able to engage in the subject really well when you're at university. Admissions staff on the other hand are more broadly experts in university admissions is what they do deal with on a day-to-day basis. They have a very broad knowledge of the entire application process and they know what a wide variety of subjects are looking for. As well as this they want to see your overall suitability for the university taking into account your skills and your hobbies and interests and how you'll be a generally good fit for the university. It can be difficult to know what to actually include in your personal statement. I would say just bear in mind that the things that I'm about to talk about don't necessarily apply to every single personal statement you might not want to include everything that I mentioned this is just to give you an idea especially if you're starting out. So the things that are coming up now are all different topics that you might want to think about including. You'll notice that the first three that I include there are all subject focused and that's because it's really important that you get across your interest in studying your subject in your personal statement. Then there are other things that you can include as well and these are all sorts of demonstrating your overall suitability for university and they tell us a little bit more information about you. When you're thinking about those different topics it's also important to consider the structure. So the structure you could decide to go with in one that I've outlined here is very basic and that is because you are limited as I said earlier in how much you can write. At start with an introduction it doesn't need to be massively long but in here you want to grab the reader's attention and hook the person who's assessing your application. They could have read several applications before yours so you know make sure that as much as possible yours is interesting and authentic. Here perhaps you could start with thinking about your motivation to study your subject and that would allow you to then move on to the bulk of your personal statement and this is where you really need to talk about your interest in the subject. You could follow that with some of your extracurricular activities and the skills that you've built up from that before rounding it off with a conclusion. Similarly to your introduction this doesn't need to be very long but it's nice to wrap up what your personal statement is saying and to conclude in a way that you think is most appropriate. So considering those things that I've mentioned before let's just look at where they could fit into this structure. As I've mentioned although we've got a section here about subject interest your interest really should span the entirety of your personal statement. You'll see it there at the top and really it should be something you come back to throughout the entire personal statement. In your subject interest section though if you're thinking about what you actually might want to write in here you can look at your experience studying that subject so far. If you've not been able to study your subject before then think about where you could get some subject experience from. This could be in the form of subject hasted days or master classes or insight days that universities put on. There are lots of these available so check out university websites for them. Thinking about the extracurricular section there are a number of things you could include in here. One might be personal achievements but it's important that you consider personal achievements that are relevant to academia and the overall skills and suitability that you're bringing. You could include some of your work or voluntary work experience and you can think about the skills and qualities that you've built up doing that work. Those skills and qualities as well you can talk about ones that you've gained in the subject side of things and that helps wrap together that whole middle section. One way in which you could conclude and this is by no means how you have to conclude is talking about any gap year and future plans. This could be how you want to use your degree in the future and what you plan to go on to do perhaps further study or a particular career. However as I've said you don't have to necessarily go with that order you could even open up your personal statement in the introduction with your future plans and how you plan to use your degree. This is just one idea of how you might want to structure things. But as I've said a couple of times now there is no exact science to the structure of your personal statement. So long as you keep it predominantly academic then you should be okay. If you are looking for a rough split for academic to extracurricular then I'd go with roughly 75% academic to 25% extracurricular. That hopefully shows you that as long as you're focusing on the academic side of things everything should be okay. When you're considering structuring the points that you're making during your personal statement you might want to bear in mind the ABC rule. This will allow you to write concisely and to not waste any characters. So you start with an activity then you think about what you've gained from doing that and then you link it back to your course. So to give you an example maybe your activity is that you've done part-time work and the benefit of that is that you've gained a variety of skills but you could focus in here on your problem-solving ability. And linking that back to the course being a good problem solver will help you to think outside of the box and consider new perspectives when you're facing challenges during your degree. So that's one way in which you might wish to structure the points that you're making. We're very much aware at universities of the challenges that you've faced and it's been especially difficult over the last year or so to build up some of the skills and gain lots of the experiences that you might want to put in your personal statement. So I thought it'd be a good idea just to talk through some of these. On the left hand side is a column of different skills that you might want to include in your personal statement and on your right hand side are places in which you can get experience to talk about in your personal statement and this experience is really focusing on the subject that you might want to study. So these are all generally geared towards humanities and social sciences and languages degrees in general. On the right hand side there are ways in which you can open your eyes to different parts of the subject you're interested in by doing things such as independent reading, watching documentaries or listening to podcasts about your subject. A really good thing you can do is to take a MOOC which is a massive open online course and lots of universities run these so as we have a couple as well and MOOCs really give you a flavour of what it might be like to study that subject at degree level. Universities will really appreciate seeing you do something like this especially if you've not been able to study your subject before. You might also want to look out for some virtual work experience that's available, some companies and industries offer insight days or you could get a week-long work experience. You might also be able to go to museums and galleries as things are opening up more and that could be a really good way as well to broaden your horizons and find out more about the subject you're interested in and in a similar way to open online courses you could consider taster lectures as well and many universities run these and again that's a good way of finding out what what subject is like at degree level. The skills on the left hand side are things that you could draw from experiences that you've already had and that could be at school or college or from other experiences that you might go on to do so these are all helpful things to think about. You can read through this list and just consider where you might have picked up these skills so far. So we've spoken about what to include in your personal statement but now to think about what you should probably avoid. First up is negativity. It's very important in your personal statement that you're as positive as you can be and that you talk about yourself in a positive way. If you use negative language to describe yourself then that won't leave a great impression on the person who's reading your personal statement. Second is overusing quotes. You're limited in how much you can write and quote are other people's words. We really want to hear from you so it's important as much as possible to avoid using too many quotes and to actually use your own words to describe your achievements so far and your interest in studying that subject. One quote might be okay if it's relevant but please don't feel like you need to put quotes into your personal statement. But also be careful when it comes to naming a university. If you're applying to say five universities and you say that you have an absolute favorite and you really want to go there that might leave the others feeling a bit put out so just be careful. The one exception here though is if you've completed a course or similar with a university you can definitely say that you did that course with them that's great to hear but yeah you should just be careful otherwise saying that you've got a favorite university. Your personal statement is your opportunity to use your own words to talk about your interests and the subject that you're applying for. There's lots of information in your application already so you don't need to repeat all of that. So for example you don't need to explain to us where you went to school or college. You don't have to explain the A-levels or subjects that you've taken as well. We can see all of that on the rest of your statements. So don't use up your characters there. I'd also be careful using humor. Humor is very personal and subjective and it doesn't always come across as well in writing so I would stick to just writing in a slightly more factual way. It's really important that you check your spelling punctuation and grammar. People who are reading your personal statement as I mentioned earlier many of them are academics and they want to see your academic ability so it's not going to look great if you make any spelling mistakes. Next up is dishonesty. If you claim to have a certain qualification or award, UCAS can actually ask you to provide evidence of this so it's really important that everything you write in your personal statement is genuine and true and you can back it up. And finally is plagiarism. When you submit your personal statement it will actually be checked against some plagiarism detection software in the UCAS application box so if this will look for any similarities between the statement you've submitted and the statements that other people have submitted and also other common personal statement tools and resources on different websites. So it's important that you're careful here and you don't copy anyone else's work. If it does come back and detects over a certain percentage of similarity then the personal statement will be flagged and sent off to the universities you're applying to. This will be highlighted and then they can make a decision about where to go from there. It is important to know though that if you have applied to university previously through UCAS then your personal statement won't be compared to anything that you've previously submitted so that's okay. Although that might seem a little bit concerning please don't worry as long as you're honest and write your personal statement yourself then you shouldn't have anything to worry about. There is a link on the last slide with some further information about this if you need it. So when it comes to the actual process of writing your personal statement some people get stuck at the very beginning and find it difficult to start so I've outlined a couple of steps that you might want to go through. To begin with you can just brainstorm all of your ideas all of the things that you think could be relevant to your personal statement then you can look through these sort through and decide which you think are most relevant and that you're going to use in your statement. Then once you've got your idea sorted you can organise the structure that you're going to use and then comes the important bit it's time to write with clarity and use positive language. Then you should proofread your personal statement for any spelling punctuation and grammatical errors. After you've done this you can think about whether this is the best version or whether you should redraft it. Most people need to write several drafts of their personal statement before they submit. And finally something else to be aware of is supplementary statements. A supplementary statement is submitted in addition to your regular UCAS application and regular personal statement. In a supplementary statement you would submit any information that's specifically relevant to your application to us at SOAS and this has to be information that you were not able to include in your regular personal statement. For example if you're applying to four history courses at another university at SOAS you're applying to history with a language and your personal statement hasn't allowed you to address the language aspect of the course you're applying to at SOAS that's when you might want to submit a supplementary statement. You should bear in mind only some universities will allow you to do this. It's not expected of all students even if your university does allow it but there may be some cases like the one I outlined previously where it might be applicable. If you are writing a supplementary statement you should contact the admissions team directly by email about this and that's also how you would submit the statement. When it comes to submitting your supplementary statement make sure you include information about yourself including your UCAS ID number so it can be attached to your application and considered at the same time as your regular personal statements. And here's some further information. The top three links are ruled from UCAS. You have the UCAS hub with the personal statement builder tool. You have all of UCAS's dedicated personal statement information and you also have the specific information from UCAS about similarity detection and fraud or dishonest state in case you need want to read about that further. Then you have some trusted resources and advice from the student room and the uni guide and finally you have a blog post from a current SOAS student with their personal statement top tips. Thank you for watching this video. I hope it was helpful for you in your personal statement writing. If you do have any inquiries about SOAS in general or the content of this video you can get in touch at study at soas.ac.uk. Thank you.