Developing a personal statement can be a daunting and confusing process: how much time should you spend developing ideas and knowledge for your personal statement through engaging with subject-specific extracurricular reading and activities?
Unlike a well-defined school curriculum, doing extracurricular reading is potentially limitless, and from a content difficulty perspective, potentially much harder than school studies. Students often don't know where to begin, when to end, and when to stop deep-diving into a niche but difficult-to-understand topic / original research that has cost them hours and days of reading on end. Then there is also the panic of wanting to do as many job shadowing, volunteering or laboratory research experiences as possible.
Suddenly, you realise you've done all this reading and note-taking, you've done all these amazing hands-on learning activities yet you have no clue how to put it all together. How exactly are you supposed to encapsulate all this new subject-specific extracurricular knowledge and experience in an interesting and unique way using only 500-600 words? (4000 characters including spaces).
The majority of students who apply to Oxford are unlikely to have a problem developing a reasonably coherent structured text, with paragraphs, accurate grammar and engaging vocabulary. But I can guarantee that most students are unlikely to have had much engagement with a structured writing process, beyond a 5-10 minute 'plan' before an English Language GCSE exam. Then there is also the matter of writing the personal statement effectively, to capture the attention of the admissions tutors.
How much time do I need to spend planning and researching versus actually writing the personal statement? What do I mean by a 'structured' writing process, and why is it important? How can I communicate my subject-specific knowledge and interest engagingly?
This article explores all of these issues.
Contents:
When should I start planning and researching extracurricular content, knowledge and activities?
Let's start with the deadline and work backwards. For 2025 entry, the deadline for Oxbridge UCAS personal statement and application submission is Tuesday, 15 October 2024 at 6PM (UK time). With this in mind, I would recommend starting your extra-curricular reading process in June at the latest. This gives you a full summer without schoolwork to explore your interests without having to pull all-nighters to awkwardly juggle a full school day, homework, end-of-year exams.
If there are specific shadowing opportunities, courses, lab experiences etc that you want to do, you need to be on the lookout for applications from the start of the year: some places are really competitive! Projects such as EPQs and extended essays (EEs) often have timelines that are school-specific.
How much time should I spend on extracurricular learning? How should I do it?
I would recommend 1-2 hours a day, most days a week. This learning can take the form of popular books, research articles, TED talks, podcasts and online courses. You should take notes on pretty much everything, try to understand the key ideas from your notes and search further, try to link your new learnings to your existing course knowledge and reflect on how challenging it was to understand the material and how interesting it was. To keep things organised, you can have an entire notebook or online folder dedicated to this.
Whilst research projects such as EPQs and EEs require a formal piece of written work that easily serves as evidence of the detailed knowledge, skills and techniques you acquired, it is especially important to take notes of the experimental activities or courses while you do them. So many times when I work with students and I ask them about their specific contribution, or techniques learnt/observed at their summer school/work shadowing, they come up blank beyond the name of the organisation or person they worked with. This won't help you write a compelling personal statement.
Are there specific things I have to read?
While all subjects have recommended reading lists, they are very broad and designed to cover the topics within a subject. If something doesn't make that much sense to you even though you spent ages on it, and it wasn't a particularly enjoyable experience to learn, it's probably not something you want to comment on in your personal statement. The personal statement should be shaped by your unique interests, commenting on what and why you found it interesting, and not forcing yourself to write about topics you don't care for, don't understand or perhaps didn't even engage with properly, just because they look impressive or are 'trending' in your field.
How much extracurricular reading is too much? When should I stop?
Ultimately, you should find the extracurricular reading interesting, otherwise you probably wouldn't have chosen your subject. As long as you are balancing, school, health, social and other responsibilities alongside this additional reading, and you find it fun, then there is no harm in continuing to read for pleasure. That said, by early to mid-September, you should have read, taken notes on, and understood enough extracurricular material for multiple personal statements worth of content. At this point, you can begin to consolidate your existing knowledge. As a rough guide, having done 3 extracurricular activities and having read and understood 3 new concepts/pieces of research to a level beyond your curriculum is more than enough. The quality of your contribution, understanding and interpretation trump quantity.
When should I begin writing my personal statement and how should I do it?
Earlier, I talked about a structured writing process. This is what we use at ElvisOxfordCoach to help students develop their personal statement and typically we recommend this process begins from early to mid-September.
Writing begins with developing an outline: bullet point ideas for each of the sections of your personal statement (introduction and motivation for the subject; extracurricular readings, activities and learnings; non-subject specific extracurriculars; future perspectives; conclusion). At this stage, include things and ideas you are fully convinced by as well as those you are unsure of. Don't worry about length, it can run over two pages at this stage. Working with an experienced subject mentor or academic coach can really help you analyse the value of these ideas and which content to prioritise. For example, if you engaged with two lab experiences and you learnt similar techniques and skills in both, do you need to mention both?
Once the outline has been reviewed and the list of potential ideas shortened, the next step is to put the personal statement into full text. This is the development of the first draft. At ElvisOxfordCoach, in this stage of development, we focus on ensuring the content is organised well, paragraphs connect, and that a key theme or angle of interest runs through your personal statement. Having a theme that runs through your personal statement is key to creating an authentic voice that captures the specific topics of interest within your subject. See more about this in my '3 top tips for Oxbridge personal statement' article.
To organise your personal statement effectively, it may be necessary to delete large blocks of text, merge or separate paragraphs, and reword opening and closing statements to tell a story. Even at this stage, it may be worthwhile to consider new ideas or resources to help you understand a concept, a piece of research or a technique so that you can write about it effectively. At ElvisOxfordCoach, we can help you with this by pointing you to the right original research, websites and other resources and talking you through the content during a lesson so that you can effectively incorporate the feedback for the next draft review.
By the second draft, the personal statement should be more or less the right length, maybe one paragraph too long at the very most and the set of ideas near finalised. At this stage, we revise for scientific/theoretical accuracy and ensuring you effectively communicate your passion for the subject and interpretations of the idea. Have you used an abbreviation that would be unclear to a non-specialist researcher? Have you explained a process or idea accurately and clearly, without reporting every single detail in a dry factual way that shows little more than being a copy-paste exercise? Is it clear what your contributions were during your work shadowing or research project? If you've included something, have you justified its inclusion i.e what did you learn? Why is it interesting to you? How does this knowledge impact your subject? How could it help societal problems? How did it inspire you onto further activity or reading? At the second draft stage, each sentence in the personal statement has to be connected to the one before and the one following.
The final draft takes a precise, word-by-word approach to analysing the personal statement. Do we really need that word? Can we rephrase to use active voice or shorten the sentence to get under the word count? Are there any grammatical mistakes or repetitions of phrases that reduce the quality of your writing? You should arrive at the final draft stage by early October, giving you peace of mind with plenty of days to spare before submission.
Why is a structured writing process beneficial?
By building your personal statement in a structured way, you can save time and focus on what is important at each stage. For example, there is no point in fine-tuning a first draft excessively, worrying excessively over adjective choice or stressing about having an amazingly compelling first and final sentence, if the ideas are not connected logically and the text still exceeds the word count significantly. Once you have the content completely decided upon completion of the second draft, you can meticulously refine and reword to make it sound more compelling and check for spelling, grammar and vocabulary use. There's no point rewriting and rewriting a first draft to make it read beautifully only for your academic mentor, teacher, tutor etc to tell you most of the ideas are not relevant and have to be deleted.
How can ElvisOxfordCoach help?
At ElvisOxfordCoach, we can support you through each stage of the personal development process. Don't worry if you're not on track with the personal statement development timeline I outlined in this article. Each student has different circumstances and different abilities, and my timeline is a very cautious one that allows for plenty of time at each stage so that students don't feel overwhelmed. Each stage of development, idea generation, outline, first draft, second draft and final draft can be neatly fit into 1-1.5h sessions, with detailed verbal and written feedback provided. Whether you need support from the very beginning or are only looking for a subject expert to review your nearly ready personal statement before submission, we are here to help. Our specialisation is in Biochemistry, Biology and Chemistry applications but we are expanding to work with trusted partners across a broader range of subjects.
We hope this article has been of great help to you. If you would like to discuss how we can provide personalised 1:1 personal statement development, please click below for a free 20-minute consultation!
.
Comments