02. Personal Statements!
The personal statement is your first chance to show off who you are, what you’re excited by, and why you’d make a great student. It takes the form of a 4,000 character piece of writing (roughly one page of A4), submitted with your UCAS application. For Cambridge, that application needs to be in quite a bit earlier — before October 15th — so it’s a good idea to start thinking about your personal statement over the Summer.
In this post, we’ll give some advice on how to best communicate who you are and why you want to study architecture through your personal statement; we then cover editing your personal statement, and offer some example statements from current Cambridge students.
What Should I Write About?
One way you could think of the content in an architecture personal statement is through three categories:
Research, Observations, and Actions.
Research:
What books, documentaries, presentations, exhibitions, websites, podcasts, magazines, etc., have you read, watched, visited, listened to? Most importantly, how have they influenced how you think about architecture?
Observations:
What buildings and spaces have you been influenced by, enjoyed, hated, found humour in, delight, disappointment, discomfort? These could be from far away or just down the road. A bus stop can be just as architecturally interesting as an opera house.
Actions:
What have you done in the past that demonstrates your value as a passionate student and future designer? This could include mentions of work experience, activism, engagement in your local communities or school, summer schools, weekend jobs. Have you worked on projects in a team before? None of these things has to be directly related to architecture — lots of the skills displayed are very transferable to our degree!
Once you start drawing connections between these different areas of interest and experience, your personal statement should start coming together. Let’s dig into that part further…
Writing It All Out:
Here’s some guidance to getting all your thoughts on paper:
Structure:
Personal statements can follow any structure. You could write out the list of ideas you want to include on scraps of paper and start rearranging them on a table to see what flows best into what else.
The first sentence is often the hardest to write, so maybe write it last. If you’re struggling, then keep in mind that a personal statement is personal — it could start with the word ‘I’?
You might also struggle with ending the statement. The people reading them understand they are very short, so don’t be too worried if yours just, sort of, ends. But feel free to leave your reader on a positive note!
Show, Don’t Tell:
It’s much more effective to show your reader how passionate you are than to say ‘I am highly passionate’. Try to write about what you’ve done that demonstrates your values and work ethic: it’s the difference between saying ‘I was scared at first, but I overcome the fear to jump out of the plane and pull my chute’ instead of ‘I am brave’.
Keep it Professional:
Unfortunately, you’re not applying for a degree in comedy — so it’s probably not the time for humour. Treat yourself seriously and you can expect your reader to, too.
Now you’ve written everything down, it’s probably a good moment to take a step back and leave it for a few days. After that, we’ll start editing.
Okay, So You’ve Got a First Draft: What Now?
This is where the editing begins. It’s also the time to start bringing in some other eyes to check over what you’ve written.
Someone else will spot your flabby phrasing and superfluous synonyms more easily than you, so the first step to editing is to find someone else to read it. This could be a teacher, a parent, carer, or other family member, even having a friend read it back to you will help!
Having someone else read it back will help you understand what you’ve written about, and should pull up anything that doesn’t make sense or read quite right. Reading especially tricky sentences aloud while editing can really help them flow well by the end.
It’s good to be aware of the tendency for some personal statements to get a little ‘flowery’. This isn’t a vocabulary competition, it’s about clear communication. If you’re over the character count, take a look at your language: could you cut out that complex adjective and still communicate your point?. Would a shorter word work?
* these tips are adapted from George Orwell’s “Rules for Writing”.
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By this point your statement is ready to upload! If you’re looking for examples, though, there’s some below!
Some Examples:
01. Personal Statement Example
