Personal Statement

Personal Statement 

What is a Personal Statement:

A personal statement is an application to study at a university or college. It is a chance for everyone to articulate why they like to study a particular course or subject and what skills & experiences he or she possess that show your passion for your chosen field.

What Personal Statement should include:

When you write a personal statement, the statement must be unique and nothing too complex. Be careful with humour, quotes, or anything unusual so that the admissions tutor doesn't have the same sense of humour as you. Always make sure to structure your information to reflect your skills and qualities that colleges and universities value the most and also talk about the skills that you personally gained such as time management, customer service, teamwork, computer skills etc. Even if you don't have any work experience, you could also include your hobbies and interests that demonstrate skills that are important to the job that you are applying, and it is very important to stay clear of any personal information that isn't relevant to the role of the university that you are applying. The one of the don'ts of a personal statement is do not be tempted to copy and paste a personal statement or share your own personal statement because all personal statements will be checked for similarity and if you get caught, your personal statement will  be flagged as the same as other applicants and because of that, the chances of you join in will be slim.

Importance of Personal Statement:

The reason why personal statement is so important is because it is all about you and showcasing your personality. Personal statement should be personal and engaging, also the personal statement has to be written by you because in some instances, other people rely on websites or other people to write their own personal statements so it is really important to write you're own personal statement because this will show your professionalism when applying for university or college and when you write your own personal statement, you will write even more things about yourself than other people doing it for you. Another thing that is really important about personal statement is that it shows your personality, experience, achievements and your future ambitions to universities that you are applying for and universities can get to know you better and why you want to apply for that particular course. The one thing that you shouldn't do when writing a personal statement is do not copy and paste someone else's work because your personal statement will go through to the UCAS Similarity Detection Service to test for plagiarism.     

Personal Statement Examples:

In this first example, it starts with the objectives for the future by telling us that people need to be well equipped in order to solve the problems in the developing countries, problems such as educational development and to propose effective solutions which can make good use of local people. By starting with this it shows the ambitions of the person, as he or she wants developing countries like Paraguay, Peru, Philippines etc to improve their problems with their education systems and anything that is good for those poor countries and also overall quality in life, that is a good start for a personal statement in my opinion. Next the person starts mentioning his experiences in traveling abroad as the person went for a trip to Kubuchi desert in China as apart of forestation project. The person tells us that he experienced cultural differences and wealth gaps between the rich and the poor and since then, the person became moved and devotes to work for the area of international cooperation. I'd say I'm happy that he included his experience in another country because this can be shown to the university that this person is applying for, the knowledge of other cultures and economies of other countries as well. In the last paragraph, the person mentions his desire to gain more knowledge of educational developments and also learn many things in order help the other local people in those countries to be more vitalized and independent. Through out in this personal statement, this person shows commitment to help the developing countries to become more developed and wealthy, this shows that this person likes to help others and make them successful. I don't think that this person has missed anything that should be in a personal statement, he mentioned his ambitions, graduation and experience. 

In this second example, this person is an engineer and he or she has learned a lot of experience before he or she being an engineer, but the person says on the personal statement that he or she has suffered a lot of setbacks including one mistake that completely destroyed months of work because of one mistake and the person also mentions that he or she has learned from their mistakes and over come it by making better products at the end. Personally, I think that this person did very well to include the mistakes because the university will look at this and will be impressed with this personal statement, as this person is not a quitter and will correct his or hers mistakes to make it even better product, this also shows that this person is determined to do better every time when their is a setback. In the next paragraph, the person explains how hard the engineering is a difficult job to work and did not expect an easy ride when he or she was at college and started to look at Lasham University of what has to offer for his higher education of engineering. The university has activities that would definitely help this person with the education such as an extracurricular activities tailored for engineers, which the person is looking forward to use the knowledge and skills to potentially make lives easier for everyone around the world. Overall, this personal statement has succeeded in every element, he mentioned the person's past experiences with in the engineering job and how he or she corrected their mistakes by making the product even better than which shows the willingness to do better, which is good to have that personality during work. Lastly, the person includes his or hers willingness to improve their skills and share their knowledge by wanting to join the university, this shows their commitment even more as they want develop in order to get better and help people with their lives as well.

My Personal Statement:

I currently study Level 3 Creative Media at Sunderland College. I chose Media because I want to be a Sports Journalist as I have great interest football journalism and, I like to write posts on football. The course has supported me on my chosen degree route. I have been supported by lecturers and have done a lot of research during my Personal Development classes to discover universities that would be perfect for me to pursue my career as sports journalist. In December 2021, the college invited someone who is a sports journalist and talked about his experiences and talked about the university that he suggested for us to go if we were interested. University really attracted me to go there as they will help you develop my skills even further such as writing and personally that is a skill that I am keen to improve one because I want my writing to be professional and organised as I want my future audience to understand of what I wrote by making my writing too difficult for them in terms of words that they might not even heard of. The skills that I have gained during media is filming, editing and writing. All these skills I would say that writing is my strongest skill because I like to write about things that I am really interested on such as football, I also have learned to write long paragraphs but in those huge chunks of writing, I was taught to add important points in order pass Media because if you write a paragraph and the other half does not really have those key points, you will not pass the course. I gotten experience from group projects in college, my role during these projects at times were most of the time filming and put all the videos from SD card to the macs and create a file on teams to put all the videos so the people that I have worked with can use the videos to create their own video. So, the skills that I have developed through out these projects were teamwork skills and communication skills as I helped the people that I worked with by being the camera man and appearing in the videos if I had the role for making these videos funnier at times. As for communication skills, during the projects I would often say that I do not want to be in the videos because I am not that keen to be in the videos as I like to work outside of it like filming or editing so I would voice my decisions into the group, and they would respect my choices. For a hobby and my own business experience, I have an Instagram account dedicated to the club I support; in there I post almost daily about the club like match days, transfer rumours and news about what is going at the club in general. The account currently has 694 followers which I did not expect that I would have that many followers as most accounts that I encountered had few followers and the user just gave up on the account completely. But my account got the attention of others and the other accounts that had way more followers than me, started to promote my account on their Instagram stories and that is how I got my followers. The course should choose me because I will be dedicated to write articles about football in general like what I am currently doing with my Instagram account. I think I can bring much more to the course by showing of what I can do and my skills to become a sports journalist, like searching for valuable information and getting them from trustworthy sources etc. I will take the course seriously as I want to get the education that I need to become a full-time sports journalist as I am passionate of what I am doing. The skills that I have that would be relevant for my course is writing because if it is something that is about the sport, I can write a paragraph or two about it as I am passionate about the sport.

Evaluation:

I think I did alright when writing my own personal statement, I had to change my personal statement so many times because I have missed important parts like what skills I have gained during college and what were my strengths and weaknesses etc. Where as for the research about personal statement, I have researched about what you should include in your personal statement and why personal statement is important also, I have included two examples of personal statements that I founded online and I basically just giving my opinions and highlighting what's missing and what things they should have included etc. The thing that I should have done from the way beginning is structuring my personal statement in the correct order because I have submitted my personal statement to UCAS, my application was sent back due to not being structured properly or not worded correctly but I did manage to correct those mistakes in the end and send my application to UCAS.