Starting your UCAS Personal Statement

Your school may give you help with writing your UCAS Personal Statement, but it can really only come from you, as you are the main topic. It’s also a way for universities to see how well you can articulate why you want to be on that course.

You may want to include:

Interest – what is it about your chosen subject that interests you?
Relevant skills – do you have any skills or abilities that are relevant to the course? (e.g. analysing information, working with others, organisational skills.)
Work or volunteer experience.
Why you think you are a good candidate.

The UCAS website has lots of useful information about writing a good Personal Statement, including the UCAS Personal Statement Tool to help you get started!

These tools can help you think what to write about and how to structure your Personal Statement. Try to:

answer the questions to get some initial ideas down
review and refine your answers
keep track of your word count as you create your draft!

If you'd prefer, why not take inspiration from this UCAS video which contains advice from an admissions tutor about how to plan, structure and end your Personal Statement.

You can also follow this Workshop on Writing your Personal Statement which is by the YourEd Team at the University of Edinburgh (video length 39mins 33seconds).

It covers the Why, Where, When, Who, What & How of Personal Statement writing, and you can make notes and draft your statement alongside this video.

LEAPS would like to extend a big thank you to the YourEd Team at the University of Edinburgh for sharing this resource.

Please note: The YourEd programme is available for selected schools, however this resource is relevant to all students!

If you've had your LEAPS Pre-UCAS Interview, dig out your action plan and take a look at the things you discussed – your passion for your course choice, your work experience – and start writing!

The Employment part of your application is where you can list your work and volunteer experience. Courses like Nursing and Teaching will be looking for specific experience. However, the most important place to talk about additional experience is in your Personal Statement.

It's normal to go through a few drafts before you get to the final version that you submit as part of your UCAS application, so just keep this in mind when you're working on your statement.

If you have any trouble accessing the above resources, please get in touch and we'll do what we can to help.

Editing your UCAS Personal Statement

If you have a completed draft of your Personal Statement and you're looking to edit and finalise it, check out our blog post about Editing your UCAS Personal Statement here.