My experience is mostly for Oxbridge and for Maths/Computer Science (and that's what I'm going to assume for the following tips), but the lessons below apply to other universities and courses too - adapt them to your personal taste and needs.
- Make the structure very clear and to the point. For example:
- Intro (1 sentence)
- CS competition results (if any)
- Other CS activities (books, camps, projects)
- Maths competition results (if any)
- Other Maths activities (books, camps, projects)
- Teaching (if any)
- Language (1 sentence) + Hobbies (0 or 1 sentence)
- Outro (1 sentence)
- In the above structure, take your primary field first (CS above) and add other fields as you see fit (for example, you might have Physics, and you might not have Maths).
- Do not hide the information you want to convey. Make is as simple, direct, and clear as possible. Reviewers will spend very little time reading through it.
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DO NOT COPY ANY OF THESE NOTES VERBATIM! Rephrase them! If you copy it word-by-word, your PS might become flagged for plagiarising and you might get disqualified.
- Imagine that you're the reader of the personal statement. How would your personal statement read? For starters, the reader likely has no idea about your school or the competitions and activities you participate in - so you have to provide some context.
- For competitions you talk about, specify the target student group, the number of participants, and the level of students.
- For example, for the Hungarian OKTV (“National Olympiad in Mathematics”) you can mention the age group (17-18-year-olds) and that it’s open to all students, and that thousands of students participate.
- When mentioning your school, specify its qualities:
- For example, for Fazekas, you can emphasise the advanced maths class, the weekly number of classes (including extracurricular maths classes (matekszakkör)), that it’s “Hungary’s #1 school in maths”, that it has the most students going to international olympiads, and that it has a 100% rate of students progressing to higher education.
- For activities, again, specify the target student group and the material you covered.
- For example, for the Hungarian Pósa camp, you can mention how many students are invited from each year, the kinds of problems you solved, the areas you touched, the proof techniques you learnt - all this to give a taste of the kind of maths you learnt.
- Note that what is trivial to you, might not be for others. For example, typical English schools don’t teach many proof techniques.
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Don’t include a lot of clichés, it doesn’t help and it’s really annoying to read.
- In particular, when you describe reasons, figure out your real reasons, not fake ones. For example, do you really want to go the given university because you are "excited by the diverse culture you can experience to expand your horizons", or is it because you want the strongest education attainable to you? It's OK to write what you actually believe, not what you think they want to hear (clichés).
- When asking for feedback/review, ask at most twice:
- Once about the structure and content, 2-4 weeks before the deadline
- Once about English grammar, 1-2 weeks before the deadline
- (The people you ask for help might be busy, so you have a better chance of getting a response if you ask for help earlier.)