Any college or university will use your UCAS form to find out (a) whether you’re suitable for them (b) whether you’re suitable for the course.
We’ll also be looking for how much you care about your subject, how keen you are, and what your aspirations are. Tell us how you’ve performed in related areas previously, and whether you have the required entry criteria. We’ll want to gauge whether you’re committed, or likely to drop out; and whether you’ll work hard, or whether someone else might be more deserving of the place here. We’ll want to know how you’d handle working under pressure, and how well you’ll adjust to college life.
Part of the application is the ‘personal statement’: this is to help us get to know you—what have your life experiences been? What are your interests, and why, and what have you learnt from them? What do you hope to get out of college life?
Here are some of our tips:
Log onto the UCAS site at http://www.ucas.co.uk/
• Take your time over your UCAS form; keep coming back to it with a fresh eye.
• Ask friends and family to look over the drafts. Have you undersold yourself? Is it clear? Is it well-expressed?
• Take great care over spelling and grammar; you don’t want to appear sloppy or illiterate!
• Use up all the given space: don’t waste a single opportunity to impress us.
• Don’t lie! Would you be able to keep it up for years? And what if you got found out?
• Never, ever use someone else’s personal statement, pay to have one written, or copy one off the internet. That’s cheating, yet an astonishing 1 in 20 UCAS applicants do it—and you’ll almost certainly be found out. See the BBC webpage about plagiarising UCAS forms.
Here are some more tips:
UCAS’ own advice on the personal statement
