Saying why you want to take your course is possibly the most important part of your personal statement.
You can have perfect grades, great extra curricular activities and be a really wonderful person, but if admissions tutors feel you aren't committed to your course, you won't get a place.
Hopefully the notes you have written for the section above have already given you a good idea of what to write about why you want to take your course.
If not then you should at least be sure you want to take that subject - writing a personal statement is a lot of work, and you don't really want to get to the end of it and decide you want to study a different subject. So before you go much further be sure you have chosen the right subject for you.
As mentioned earlier, if you’re still not sure about your choice of course, check out our section on choosing a degree (http://www.studential.com/applying/choosingadegree) to help you make a final decision.
Remember you don't actually have to choose the course you want to take yet, just have a rough idea of the subject area (or areas) you might be interested in.
Now you need to think about exactly why you want to take this subject. Even if you are 100% sure that this is the course for you, you still need to get this across to the admissions tutors.
If they accept you, you are going to be studying this course for at least the next three years, and you need to convince them that you are committed to it. Have a think about exactly why the subject appeals to you, and write down as much as you can about it.
It doesn't matter if you only scribble a few notes - you can modify them before you write the statement, and the important thing is you can be sure of the key reasons why you want to take the subject.
Write down as many as you can, and if you end up with quite a few, you can always just pick the best. Remember - if you can't think of any good reasons - should you really be taking that subject?
What if I want to do a joint degree?
There are two options you can use to tailor your personal statement to joint degrees (a degree where you take two subjects e.g. Economics and Politics).
You can talk about the subject you feel is most important, and not mention the other.
This has the advantage that you can apply for two different joint degrees and only talk about the common element e.g. for Economics and Politics and Law and Politics, you would only talk about politics.
If you decide to do this, make sure you talk about the qualities you have which show you are suitable for the other half of your joint degree.
Alternatively you can just talk about why you want to do both subjects, although the approach you choose will probably depend on how closely related your subjects are.
What if I want to apply for different subjects? There is no easy way to write a personal statement for two unrelated subjects.
If the subjects are similar, such as Maths and Statistics, or Accounting and Business Studies, you may find you can write a general personal statement that applies equally to both courses.
If this is the case you many not want to mention either of the subjects by name, and instead talk about the related work that you've already done and why you have enjoyed it.
If your subjects are totally unrelated there is no way you wan write a personal statement that will cover all of them. Instead you need to come up with a statement that gives you the best chance of being accepted.
For example, if you are applying for one subject at four of your university choices and another subject at the other two, you may just want to write a statement related to the subject you chose to study at four universities and either forget about, or change the course, at your other two choices.
You also want to consider your predicted grades in relation to the universities you are applying to.
Universities that normally make lower offers are less likely to be concerned about a badly targeted personal statement, whereas for universities that make high offers, the personal statement will be much more important.
Try and alter your personal statement so it is more specific to the universities asking for higher grades, as this will give you the best chance of being offered places at all your choices.
There will probably be some cases where there is nothing you can do, for example, if you are applying for three totally unrelated subjects, each at two different universities.
There is no advice that will help in a situation like this, except just to consider whether this is really what you want to do, and that you may be seriously reducing your chances of being offered a place on your chosen courses.
Even if you do apply for three different courses, you will only be able to study one of them, so it helps if you try to limit your choices to similar subjects.
Read example personal statements
Some people may know exactly how they are going to lay out and write their personal statement, but for the rest of us it's a bit more difficult.
Even though you now know what you're going to put in your statement, do you know how to make it read well?
The best way to get an idea of how to go about producing your personal statement is to look at some other people's statements.
This gives you a chance to see the sort of structure and language other people use, how they explained why they wanted to study their chosen course, as well as their own interests and abilities.
When you read through sample personal statements, have your own notes from the section above ready. If you find anything you've done but haven't already thought about, make a note of it.
Reading through lots of personal statements will allow you to judge which ones you think are good or bad, and find parts of statements you really like or dislike. This exercise will come in useful in the next section.
Hopefully your school or college will give you some example personal statements, but if they don't, there are loads of personal statement samples (http://www.studential.com/personalstatements/) available here at Studential.
We have a collection of over 1000 personal statements (http://www.studential.com/personalstatements/), making us home to the largest catalogue of personal statements on the web.
Goals of your personal statement