how important is the personal statement? What should I say/not say to really make my application stand out/improve my chances of getting in? All very reasonable questions asked by young alumni in their quest for better prospects.
So let me clear it up for you in a neat short paragraph.
The personal statement, is an over-rated piece of turd. You will spend hours sweating, crying and bleeding anally to get it perfect and you know what's the best part of it...? no-one gives a shit. Yup I just told you the secret.
Just imagine you've got a guy, with 6 U's and 1 C at GCSE, AS results pending and he whips out an awesome personal statement, written in a perfect Iambic pentameter (Shakespeare style), do you throw him a lifeline? give him the unconditional offer? or press the sneaky little reject button?
As Ali-G would say, keep it real.
Well what if its close between candidates? Just imagine two dons sitting together, really thinking about which candidate is truly the “best”.
“Oh look, he's mentioned Einstein”
“but come on...! he's talking about Aristotle and Riemann!!!!”
cut the crap.
You've been studying Physics properly for one year now, if your like me 2. Nobody expects you to cite in detail which particular area's of quantum-electrodynamics you've spent the last decade reading about and want to take further. As one don in Oxford put it on the open day “I find Personal Statement such a load of crap that I've stopped reading them”, he reckons there was so much bullshitting about topics in there that every time he asked the candidates they were totally embarrassed and it messed up the entire interview.
Shall I mention my hobbies? I'm really passionate about playing my flute in the Orchestra and want them to know that... and they care because? Your applying (hopefully) to top notch academic uni's, keep it almost entirely academic. No-one cares whether your siik at brake-dancing, or can pick up chicks using only 3 words, whether your propper hench or any of a long list of achievements you can think of. I got this completely wrong with my first personal statement and I hope you can avoid the same.
The whole point of a P.S is to show that your taking your time and effort to attempt to write a decent document which they may consider reading. The theory goes that if you've tried hard to bring your passion across in a short document, then your clearly taking the course and the university application process, seriously. Definitely mention your hobbies, as it shows passion and it shows time management skills (in the word of an imperial don I think). But remember that your writing to a professor that has dedicated his life to the subject. If you've never done the Olympiad, now may be a good time to start, if you've not considered going to lectures, reading around the subject, sitting extra papers, reading lots of books/journals, now's the time.
Whilst some universities won't care, a lot of them will use the P.S as a start to a conversation, its one of the very few things they've read which is 100% you, be prepared to be tested and asked on it! Please don't quote a book you haven't read.
Just to give you an idea, in my Manchester interview I was asked about the specific heat capacity at near absolute zero and the theoretical implications and how it was derived and he attempted to further my knowledge using wave functions and kinetic theory. In Oxford, my first interview, they literally raced through the P.S, ripping me apart on every part of Physics i'd mentioned, asking me to in depth explain it, stopping me midway through making me clarify and correct myself, really prodding whether i'd actually understood any of what I’d written. To be honest it was more of a method of pressure/harassment than anything, but w/e. Cambridge took an active disinterest in it, the woman started glancing over it midway through the interview and asked me about my band, mentioning that she had a dog also called “Fury”, she then proceeded to ask me a question which I'd already answered in the personal statement...
The point I’m trying to make is, don't worry about making this into an absolutely stunning piece of writing. Chances are whoever is going to read it, will probably just skim through the odd bit. Just make sure that whatever you do write, has a lot of positive academic content and that all of it is something you are willing to be asked about from all angles.
Praise for this document
clearly only an arrogant prick would take the time to copy and paste praise he has received onto the same page as the website to boost his ego. That said, this comment was so good that it just had to be on here
“[I now] feel that drafting my ps seven times was now a tragic waste of time” - Bimal Patel, 1st year LSE economics student, after being shown the first draft of this document.
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