Personal Statement Help Question Thread 2014-15

Oops sorry I typed it wrong! I meant to say the sustainable bit was the finishing sentence for my epq paragraph (second) ! (My bad)



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Could i apply for opthalmic dispensing/ optometry and biomedical science like are they closely related?!?!?!

They may be in a similar field (i.e. related to medicine), but they are actually very different. Biomed will be a lot more lab based if you were to go on to do the actual job, for example. You couldn't write a PS adequately for both

but I want to go into optometry so could I still not write a personal statement with both the courses

If you want to go into optometry then apply for and write a statement for optometry.

With career related courses like this you're competing against people who are applying JUST for that course to do that job - if you look undecided in your PS then you will get rejected.

Hi!!

My teacher told me to link my medicine personal statement to my A levels or wider reading. Do you think this is necessary? Surely everyone does bio and chem for a level so I don't see what's so special about it. I could state that I particularly enjoyed a topic in biology but that doesn't really add value to my personal statement. I am a bit wary about mentioning books but maybe I could mention an article but then again how does that add value to my personal statement unless I learned something from it.

Is it really necessary?

Your teacher - like most- is entirely mistaken. Do not mention your A levels.

You can mention wider reading if you want to, particularly if applying to Oxbridge, but otherwise don't worry too much

Your teacher - like most- is entirely mistaken. Do not mention your A levels.

Whilst I agree that the teacher is mistaken in this case, your judgement seems a little sweeping. Many of us know quite a lot about university applications.

I agree and I don't. Many teachers know a lot but of course. But then at the same time there are an awful lot who don't seem to know that the normal rules are quite different when it comes to medicine. We are constantly asked in PS Help if their teachers are right in saying that they should write about their A levels. And from my own experiences at my colleges, the advice I was given was almost entirely inappropriate!

You are of course, our favourite exception but my general experience is quite different

I'm sorry to hear that. We have a specialist team who deal with medicine applications, as was the case at the two previous schools I worked in and also where my husband has worked. Perhaps we have been fortunate in our colleagues.

That's amazing, and should be the normal - at the very least colleges should have specialist teams that work with uni applicants! Perhaps I just went to really dodgy colleges

I want to become an optician and I don't think I can do a direct route into optom so thought I will do opthalmic dispensing or biomed

Why not?

desperately need help!

I attended a biology-based work placement through the nuffield research placement scheme in the summer and I want to apply for chemistry.

At first I didn't want to mention the work placement because it's not chemistry related. But now my teacher told me to put it in my PS because not many people got a placement through nuffield?

I am really struggling of what to write and how to link it to chemistry.

Although it's suppose to be a 'research' placement, all I did for 4 weeks was shadowed a few undergraduates and see what experiments they are doing, read loads of papers regarding the stuff they're researching about and made a presentation of what I saw (I didn't even get to present it to people so no presentation skills obtained).
I can't think of any useful skills at all that can be linked to university studies.

Please help~

Havent got the grades

For the hobbies and interests bit, how far can you go back to get your hobbies and interests Because I used to have a lot more hobbies and interests than I do now so I'm really struggling on writing anything, but say during my 4th and 5th year I was really into badminton but I didn't go to any clubs could I still mention my love for it? It's completely unrelated to what I want to study (maths) but I don't really have a lot of hobbies that relate to maths? Or at least I can't think of what hobbies link to maths?