The harvest is in, the smell of dried leaves is in the air, Parliament’s back in session, and pretty soon the 17-year-olds will start ringing: the university admissions deadline is approaching and someone will need to write their personal statements for them.
Everyone who wants to go to university is required to fill in a Ucas form. It’s an administrative task until you get to the dreaded personal statement section, and then you have to call for back-up. The Ucas website encourages students to commit their personality to paper. In no more than 4,000 characters, they should outline key skills and hobbies and explain what’s drawn them to their chosen subject. Worse still, the personal statement is allegedly extremely important: ‘This may be your only chance to make the case for you to be offered a place,’ the Ucas website says. Those 4,000 characters (about 850 words) are the bane of sixth-formers’ lives. It’s no wonder that, left to their own devices, they come up with things like: ‘An extremely significant educational experience that led me to this application was when I first read The AS Level Constitutional Law Textbook,’ or: ‘My passion for business was first born when I did work experience in a shop and realised that business is vitally important to all our lives,’ and so on.
They need help, and they’d be crazy not to get it. ‘Why would anyone write their own?’ says my cousin Malachy Guinness, who set up a tutoring agency. He points out that with no interviews, there’s no way of checking the authenticity of the statements. His company fields dozens of calls each month on the personal statement question. They favour a collaborative approach: ‘It’s better if the pupil has some input,’ he says.
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