Personal Statement Help

Firstly, have you checked the lines on UCAS? That sounds lot of lines for a relatively low number of characters. Are your paragraphs very short?

Secondly, if you do space properly (i.e. a space of a line between paragraphs) it is usual to hit the line limit before the character limit. If you're only halfway through at over 3/4 of the character limit, and well over the line limit, you are going to have to cut content. A personal statement is meant to be concise.

Thanks for your reply. Today I redid my entire PS that's why it is longer. How do I check on UCAS? I'm unfamiliar with the whole process as my school is rubbish.

Once you have set up your UCAS account, you can copy and paste your PS into the correct box on UCAS and it will tell you how many lines/characters you have used. Depending on font choice and size, your line count could go down or up. I suspect it will go down, as 3.2k characters is quite low to be hitting the line count 3.4-3.5k is more normal.

If you don't want to set up your UCAS account yet, the PS help tool on TSR should also give you a more accurate idea of lines used than just typing in word. http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/wiki/personal_statement_help

There's lots of guidance on TSR on how to fill in your UCAS form if you look, and if you're not being well supported by school, feel free to PM me at any time for further advice (as well as posting new threads, obviously).

Upon speaking to you I found this site: http://maccery.com/ps/ what are your views on this?

It seems to be quite good, unsure if I should trust the line count. By this I have 11 lines to remove!

Is it advised to leave a lines spacing or should I scrap that and have it all as one big text? If I do that, I only need to remove 4 more lines.

I've never seen that website before, so I can't comment on its accuracy. However, it seems like it could be useful. I would check your line count in UCAS before submitting, though.

Don't leave out line spacing and definitely don't have your work as one big text. Part of the purpose of the PS is to show universities how well you can write, so you want to show you can use paragraphs correctly! If you leave out proper line spacing, it also makes your work very hard for universities to read. Often admissions tutors have lots of statements to read at once, so you need to make it as easy to read as possible.

I would only ever consider taking out line spacing if I was 100% sure I had no irrelevant content (including any mentions of ECs and study not directly related to the course I was applying for) and I'd phrased things as concisely as I could (in a first draft this won't be the case). I think I would also delete my intro and maybe my conclusion entirely before cutting out line spaces- it really does make your PS so much harder to read, and so the admissions tutor will miss content anyway. They won't reread it several times to make sure they haven't missed anything.

Do lines show up?

Like start a new line for each paragraph but it isn't a physical gap like on a word document.

Unless you leave a whole white line between paragraphs there is no easy way to distinguish between paragraphs, as it will become a wall of text (even with paragraphs). It is recommended to leave a line space between

I'm taking a gap year and reapplying..can someone please tell me if my statement has to be in the past/present tense?!

I'm taking a gap year and reapplying..can someone please tell me if my statement has to be in the past/present tense?!

So gap year activities will be ones to accomplish; thus they will be in the present/future tense?

Ah no

My lines are quite distinguishable where it shows the PS in 47 lines...

Damn it

So gap year activities will be ones to accomplish; thus they will be in the present/future tense?