A personal statement an admissions tutor will finish

The most useful thing to know about a personal statement is who reads it. Not a committee, not a marketing department, and not an algorithm. An academic in the department you applied to, working through a pile in an afternoon they did not really have, looking for one thing: evidence that you can do this subject at this level.

Everything that is not that evidence is decoration, and decoration is what they skim.

Who actually reads it

It helps to picture the afternoon. Forty files on the desk. Ten minutes each if they are careful. Most statements open with a sentence about having been fascinated by the subject since childhood, and by the fourth one the reader has stopped seeing that sentence at all.

This is not cynicism. It is the ordinary condition of reading a great deal of similar writing quickly, and you can use it. A statement that says something specific in its first line gets read differently from one that warms up for a paragraph first.

The first two lines

Not why you love the subject. What you did in it.

The paper you read that changed your mind, and what you thought before. The thing you built that did not work, and what you learned taking it apart. The module you sat that made you choose this course over the one that looks identical next to it. The job that was nothing to do with your subject but taught you how a deadline behaves.

Specific beats sincere. Every reader can tell the difference and only one of them can be checked.

If you cannot fill two lines with something that happened, the problem is not the writing.

Where the middle goes wrong

The middle of most statements is a list: the prize, the internship, the volunteering, the certificate. A list reads as a list. The reader counts it and moves on.

What reads as a candidate is one or two of those things opened up. What you actually did, day to day. What went wrong. What you would do differently now. A tutor can teach somebody who knows what they got wrong. They cannot do much with somebody who has only ever succeeded.

• Pick two things, not six.
• Give each of them a difficulty, not just an outcome.
• Connect at least one of them to a part of the course you are applying to, by name.

Cut the last paragraph

Almost every draft ends with a paragraph restating the opening in different words. It is where the writer is tired and the reader is nearly finished, and it wastes the last thing they read - which is the part they remember when they come back to your file a week later.

End on the strongest specific thing you have. Then stop.

What we do with yours

We read the draft against the department's own course page, not against a template, because two universities teaching the same degree want different things and say so in public. Then we take it apart once, hard, and put it back together with you. Most statements lose a third of their length and gain everything.