Successful HSPS applicants — what did you do and your personal statements

Hello,

I’m in year 12 looking to apply for this course and am picking up on my reading/supercurriculars. I read a similar thread to this one asking for the personal statements of successful PPE applicants so I just wanted to do the same for HSPS - if anyone wants to/is alright doing it.

Hiya! I got an offer this year to study HSPS at Peterhouse. My main advice would be to sit down and brainstorm why exactly you want to do HSPS. Its passion that the interviewers are looking for (and if your grades are good you'll almost certainly get an interview for Cam). The difficulty with HSPS in particular is how broad it it. I made the slight mistake of wanting to have Anthropology. Sociology and Politics in my PS - you definitely don't need to.
Cams expects you to specialise in one of the three disciplines by the second year anyway, so if you are mainly interested in one of the three (or even two of the three) just read books and write about that!
Good luck

Hi Eleanor,
Congratulations on your Cambridge offer and I hope your exams are going great!

Yeah, I think that is very important. For me, I like the broadness of it and the different ways of approaching social issues you can get out of studying it, as talked about in the promotional video of it. I’ve looked at the course details and the documents which breakdown each essay for each paper (for year 1 anyways) and they seem fascinating.

Ah i see, thank you for warning me. It’s especially difficult to write about everything offered by HSPS because Cambridge is the only university that offers that specific course! But I think that, because I’m interested the most in politics I will write my PS focussing solely on politics + IR and then write about the other two in the SQE.

Did you write anything extra in your SQE or was it not that necessary because you had already written about all three areas in your personal statement? Also, in the SQE are there any subeject-specific questions like writing about X topic from a certain subject or is the only thing you can write about is the additional space you get to write about why you want to study HSPS at Cambridge?

Thank you for the gl and thanks again for your advice