Hello, in reference to the personal statement, I was wondering what is good for maths personal statement, and how important things like competitions and more official things are, as I was concerned that, because I was going through some stuff at the time, I did iffy on my UKMT, and only got a bronze in my Y12 one.
However, I also do as much as I can outside of school in terms of further reading, but I live in an area of low social mobility where there is no academic places where things like lectures occur, so I have turned to things like youtube videos to that end, but because I have not attended any official ones in person, will this affect me? I have listed what I have done so far and what I intend to do, in order to assess whether if I have enough to show that I am a good candidate:
- Taking part in COMPOS, an oxford run maths and phyiscs online school + done a few AMSP online things
- Taken part in competitions - The two main ones being UKMT, which as mentioned prior went iffy, and Ritangle, which I did get to the final question which was good
- I have an EDT residential in Lancaster for maths in the summer holidays
- I have written up a few papers such as for complex analysis learnt latex to write my own interpretation of the Goldbach conjecture (Mainly exploring ways to model the problem, it was not overtly complex but it was fun)
- I want to teach myself discrete maths + further stats because it looks cool and I do not do it for my FM modules
- I have some open university books on complex analysis I have been reading
- It is from when I was back at high school, so I'm not sure if this would even be relevant, but I did this online math thing called Hegarty Maths, basically this online site thing with a huge amount of questions which I think only around 100 people in England have 100% completed, but it was GCSE so I do not know how much of an impact it would make/if I should even consider it at all
- Read a couple books on the history of maths like Fermat's last theorem
- Looked at some old timey textbooks like a course in pure mathematics, also looked at this Andrew Bak book for complex analysis which was really cool
These are kind of the main things I have done/want to do, of course plus STEP prep stuff which I see a lot, but I am stressing out because I am worried, because I have generally been super busy recently so have not had lots of time for extra things because I need to even afford uni, so I need to get on top of revision, so I will have even less time for super curricular stuff, and as that these things do not show I have done anything official I am really worried, because I have wanted to go to Cambridge to get really good at maths for as long as I can remember but now I am super concerned I might not even make it be offered an interview, does anybody know if I have done enough and what I could also do if not? Because I have read some other personal statements and they all just have so much more and I am really freaking out. My apologies as I know there is a PS form, but I want to make sure I focus into Cambridge in particular to make sure I maximise my knowledge.