Breaking Down My Personal Statement (Cambridge Student)

hey friends and welcome back to my channel my name is ray and i'm a first year cambridge student studying physical natural sciences and in this video i'll be breaking down my personal statement just for context i applied to natural sciences at cambridge and durham and i applied to physics at imperial manchester and lancaster and managed to secure office from all five this video is purely for showing many of the points i mentioned in my personal statement tips video which is linked above right now in practice and i would recommend watching that first and then coming back to this video because you can see many of the tips i mentioned in that video are prevalent throughout this one i will mention the tips whenever they come up but i can't mention every fine detail of why the video will be too long also i hope that even if you do not plan on studying physics that you can still gain some insight into my thought process for writing a personal statement as a disclaimer don't copy my personal statement not even a sentence because that can lead you to copying more and more when you submit your application you cast checks your personal statement across every personal statement ever submitted to them and across the internet for similarities if your personal statement is at least 10 similar to something else then they will let all the universities that you apply to know that you plagiarized and that could ruin the application anyways now that's out of the way let's get to the video right so before we

start if you think my personal statement is quite cringe and a bit pretentious don't worry because i think that too but hey when i wrote it two years ago it did the job and my teacher seemed to like it and remember this is not the best personal statement so should not be used as a golden example of what a cambridge personal statement should look like don't read it and i think you have to be like me and do everything i did everyone is unique so we'll write different personal statements about the things they enjoy but anyway let's begin so the first thing you can see is that my personal statement is 53 characters short of the four thousand allowed on newcast and i would say that if you're running out of room and there are some things that you really do want to mention then do ask your teachers if they can include it in their reference for you so in my case there were some things about some skills that i wanted to mention but i didn't uh want to take away from anything that i've already written um so i just asked my teacher to include that detail for me in her reference so my personal statement begins with i am most confused by the breadth depth and interdisciplinary nature of modern science especially when seeing our world being revolutionized by wave of recent discoveries so i wrote this sentence as a short and snappy introduction it's basically a sophisticated way of saying i really like science which was a message that i wanted to get across whilst also showing my interest in recent scientific discoveries the problem with this is that i came up with this introduction a few months prior to writing my personal statement uh when i was reading an article and i noted this introduction down and said i'm going to use something along these lines in my personal statement but because i was so fixated on sorting it like this i could see no overall alternative i think instead had i brainstormed a few different introductions during my super career class acceptees then asked other people about their thoughts then i could have picked the best one out of them but um i think i still did the job this introduction now i say to me these exemplify that much more stems from the study of nature's quirks as this is where her secrets lie so my problem with this is that i'm not exactly sure what i meant by much more is that like much more uh much more satisfaction or much more understanding or oh yeah i'm not exactly sure i should have made that clear and i think the admissions shooter probably would have fought the same um as for the latter part um as this is about her secrets lie even though i don't think it's a personal statement cliche looking back it does seem like a book movie cliche when you're talking about the secrets of nature uh so i think if i was rewriting that now i would have left that final bit out and now in the next paragraph i said recently when discussing circle emotion and gravitational fields with my classmates i find myself asking why do planets have elliptical orbits so because i didn't really start my personal statement with a false question or experience i found it difficult to make it flow from the introductory paragraph the whole reason i decided to start off my academic section like this is because my on my first draft my teacher looked at it and commented on the fact i didn't mention anything to do with my a-levels and she reminded me that i was studying a-levels after all and it would be nice to include a bit about them so i decided to use my a levels as a stepping point for writing about supercritical activities and this is why i mentioned circular motion and gravitational fields because both of them are on the a-level physics curriculum and they can be related to things which are beyond the curriculum as well as for the question i put at the end i think that adding questions to your personal statement especially if you're writing for a stem subject can be quite powerful as it shows you're interested in the subject and like to think about it as well this goes back to my early points of show don't tell show that you have a curious mind and don't just tell them like i have a curious mind show it with some questions or with exploration and i think it is also quite fun for the reader to think the same question and ask themselves the same thing compelled to find out i stumbled upon feynman's lost lecture i found immense satisfaction in understanding how various seemingly distinct ideas e. g the inverse square law and kepler's second law combined with some elegant geometry to show why an ellipse of all shapes arises so this is where my first supercurricular mention starts uh the book finder's lost lecture and my experiences with it i think that to me now eg that invest in kepler's second law the ideas don't seem so distinct but that may have been because i've now done a year of physics at university but i think it's important to bear in mind that some of the things you mentioned may seem obvious to a professor or an academic reading a personal statement but they will understand it won't be obvious to a student which is just who's just starting out on their journey so don't be afraid in writing anything that may seem a bit too simple for their liking um as long as it's good enough for you then yeah but don't write something too simple like why is the sky blue because that's those are questions that five-year-olds ask however it left me wondering what other connections am i missing out on describing them at university will be most exhilarating so this is another part where my teacher influenced what i was writing she reminded me that after all i was planning on studying at university and i should bring more of that into my personal statement so i tried to make a link here with what i have explored myself but also saying that i'm looking forward to exploring more of my subjects at university and i think when writing a personal statement it's quite easy to forget that you are applying to university after all and you're not just writing some kind of essay about your subject i found goodstein's revival of this once lost lecture to be as refreshing as the excellent caltech series he hosted the mechanical universe so goodstein is an author of feynman's last lecture and when i searched him up i found he presented the series uh the mechanical universe which i watched on youtube and really enjoyed it's a 52 part series of roughly 30 minutes each and i think i watched the first half but that's okay because it still was quite a lot the program gave me a much more intuitive approach to much of physics but most importantly made me realize that you cannot fully appreciate a solution until you struggle with the problem itself i think the reason i included this was because it's how my supercritical activities change my perspectives on physics and problem solving itself and it's quite a good thing when super curricular activities do change your perspective on your subject because it changes the way you will be approaching it and then of course it's good to mention as well because if your perspectives have changed it's it makes an interesting discussion if you were to be asked about an interview about how it's changed why it's changed and whatnot but of course you should include some details of how and why um in your personal statement itself but of course be prepared to speak at length about it in interviews if they do ask something along those lines later i found myself reading fineman's qed the book gave me a tantalizing taste of quantum electrodynamics qed whilst answering a long-standing question of mine how does light know which path is the fastest so i think this is one example when my language gets a bit odd when i say uh tantalizing taste it makes it seem more like i'm writing some kind of literary work nevertheless this sentence touches on the second book i read whilst i did read many more i only wrote back to you in my personal statement because it is much easier to prepare for interviews if you have your books written on there instead if i mention say five books on my personal statement then i would have to prepare for an interviewer asking a question any of those five so i think this is part of the uh write more about less aspect comes in um because if you write more about less books and it plays to your advantage because you know if they were to ask a question it would be more likely to do with one of these books so when you're rereading it you have to read like reread like five different books or something you would just have to go over the one or two that you've mentioned but of course it may be a different story if you're applying for more essay heavy subjects interestingly enough i was asked about qed in my interview and the question was to briefly describe what it is about and i think the question was more success whether or not i actually read the book rather than how well i understood it because a lot of people lie and say that they've read search in such a book but they haven't actually and if that's the case and the interview catches them out with a question then it's not going to work particularly well for them initially i was reluctant to use a probability framework the theory provided perhaps i envisaged photons having some internal mechanism dictating their paths this later changed once i was marveled by the far-reaching applications this approach has uh for example being able to find the most likely path of photon would take between two arbitrary points by summing a series of arrows so this is about my experience with the book qed itself and how it changed my preconceived ideas and i think what this does well is that it shows that for your exploration uh your preconceived ideas or your understanding of the subject does change and it does sort of like broaden your horizons in a sense uh which is quite interesting to write about and discuss with an interview because of this seemingly absurd way to describe the behavior of light qed radically shifted my understanding of everyday physics i loved using the ideas i read about to explain subtle observations i make such as uh why a beautiful array of colors appear when oil slicks form on wet roads or why uh wet surfaces appear darker and this is what i mean by writing more about less here i related what i learned from qed to explain natural phenomena in the world such as the rainbow colors you see on oil snacks uh you see on the side of the road my crystal mine is prevalent even during my chemistry practice calls during a recent titration i asked why does a meniscus farm from here i learnt about how the cohesion and adhesion of water molecules lead to capillary action allowing for complex plant life to develop the polar nature of water which makes it an excellent solvent allowing it to hop a life shows just how important the recent detection of a subsurface water icon was using radio process was so i quite like this part because it does a few things well i asked another scientific related question because i was applying for natural sciences at durham and cambridge and i wanted to show that i have some interest in the other sciences too it ties together some parts of physics chemistry and even biology despite not having studied biology at a level but also just something which was big in the news at the time i wrote this and it does show that i'm quite up to date with the recent scientific news which comes under supercritical activities and that i could appreciate it from my um from the exploration i was doing around the subject and i think it flows quite well as well in the end i thoroughly enjoyed learning about qed as it was wonderfully different to anything i had encountered i hope many of the ideas i come across at un university are much the same so i decided to sum up my paragraph with an emphasis on qed and relate it back to plankton university i think this paragraph as a whole demonstrates my interest in this area of physics that i explored on my own well enough without explicitly saying something like i'm passionate about physics so i explore in my own time remember it's show not tell and i give evidence for having explored it by relating it to natural phenomena and throughout the super quick activity section you can see some more of a story happening here which adds to flow rather than me listing like uh five different books and jumping around between them and mentioning all sorts of articles and stuff i relish a challenge especially having my speed and physical insertion stretched when i scored highly on the senior maths challenge as physics challenge and cambridge chemistry challenge now in this paragraph i begin to talk about some other supercritical activities outside just reading books and exploring the internet so i participated in a bunch of challenges and wrote about them over here and if you're doing stem subjects i would suggest you find some challenges to participate in such as these challenges and many more in maths physics chemistry biology and whatnot or if you're doing a humanity subject try and find some essay competitions out to enter uh so you can write about them as well on your personal statement and i don't think it really matters if you don't like get a gold medal in it or something or you don't win first place it's about what participating demonstrates that you're willing to go and beyond to do more than what's required of you in the a-level alone these awards demonstrate my resilience and perseverance in dealing with hard questions especially the canton two-tier ones i. e the most fun ones i hope my need to always work at the edge of my abilities will help me reach sufficient mathematical fluency to appreciate the full beauty of qed so this is the only time i would say not to follow the show don't tell approach when you're trying to demonstrate transferable skills so here i briefly mentioned i have resilience and perseverance and also that i want to push myself because i'm doing these challenges uh as evidence for that and then i finally related to my future aspirations and these transferable skills resilience and perseverance are quite big deals in when it comes to further education studying in university and whatnot so the fact that i can use examples of having done these challenges as evidence of that i think it's quite good for interviewers to see um because i would say that if you don't have any examples then it's quite hard for them to actually believe you outside of academia i take an avid interest in computing video production and writing filming and editing computing related videos for my youtube channel of over 2 800 subscribers allows me to share my love and understanding of technology whilst developing my communication skills for larger audiences meanwhile writing explanations book reviews and problems for my blog has allowed me to express ideas coherently whilst consolidating my understanding within various fields so this is where i briefly talk about my extracurricular activities although the blog part of it makes it seem slightly more of a super curricular activity in this i mentioned an older youtube channel and a blog i had remember this was written two years ago and i have moved on to the project since then but i still talk about the transferable skills it demonstrates for me and like i said it's more about what you get how of the activity rather than the activity itself in terms of transferal skills i mainly mentioned communication skills over here uh from having a youtube channel and having a blog and i would say that if i did uh do other extracurriculars like maybe play an instrument and have weekly lessons or something i could have included uh time management skills um as transferable skills but i didn't have any of that and this is what i included and it still worked out fine but i would suggest that you do think about the extracurricular activities you have done and try and think about what other skills you have gained from doing them and then writing about them if possible and i would try to make it clear what transferable skills you've gained from the doing these activities because as for the admissions street says they're going to be reading for tons of personal statements and they're not going to have enough time to stop and see all the trend out or the extracurriculars you've listed and think about what skills you may have gained from doing them it's better for you to say explicitly in this case what skills you have gained from doing these extracurriculars whereas this is not really the case for the academic side anyways this section mentions what i enjoy doing in my free time and even during the interview i was asked about the competing part because the interview photo was interesting so i briefly talked about some projects i worked on ultimately i aspire to be a researcher to further advance mankind's understanding of the universe i hope you're challenging your rewarding course can bring this dream one step closer and finally i end my personal statement with a nice little conclusion that focuses on my aspirations for the future and finally ties it back to the course that i am applying for but in this case i didn't mention the name of any specific course university um for universities your one personal statement goes to all five of them which means that you should not mention the name of any specific university that you're applying to but it's okay if the university name appears such as in the cambridge chemistry challenge and as for the course if you're applying for like physics at five different universities it's fine if you say i look forward to studying physics at university or something but in my case because i was applying for free physics courses and two natural sciences courses i didn't want to write i look forward to studying physics at university because all my choices weren't pure physics and especially in the case of durham um because on their website they said they do like to see students applying for natural sciences there mention more than one science which is why i included chemistry earlier on but if i wasn't applying for durham and i was just applying for natural sciences at cambridge i probably would have included more physics and instead included more about natural sciences in the cambridge saq which is an additional form they send you after you submit your ucas application where you get another 1 200 characters to write about it's like and sort of extended personal statement almost but you don't have to fill it in if you don't want to and many people don't fill in and they still get offers in my case i included a bit more about natural sciences in there and yeah that was it and that's basically it i hope you found that

useful if you did then leave a like and if not leave a dislike and let me know why if you have any questions leave a comment down below and i'll try my best to get back to you otherwise that's it thanks for watching and i'll see you next time