Spot The Lie: The Story Of A UCAS Personal Statement

Most normal people, on finding they have bullshitted their way in to their chosen course and uni, quickly delete all evidence of the pretentious lies they spouted. I’m clearly not that smart and I am definitely going to live to regret this, as the sentimental side of me kept it.

As QUB students we have all been through this. We have suffered the stress of trying to fit as much exaggerated cheese in to what was made out to be the most important 47 lines you will ever write in your life. In reality, you could have made up absolutely everything in that word document and been given a place if you got the grades – we all know that was the real clincher. Although, if you had an interview or were doing medicine you didn’t have the luxury of lying through your teeth, like us Arts and Humanities students.

The UCAS website was consulted for every line. They suggested that:

“The strongest applicants are those who can link their extra-curricular activities to their proposed course of study.”
– Assistant Registrar for Undergraduate Admissions, University of Warwick

Eighteen year olds definitely took this way too seriously. I genuinely believed everything in my life had to somehow be linked to my want to study English and History.

Lie #1. My favourite past-time when I was 18 was clearly BOX and alcohol.

When I revisited this next line, not only did I instantly laugh hysterically at how cheesy a lie it was, but I nearly boked at it’s pretentiousness.

I was so young and naive.

I’d also love to know where the ‘honed organisation skills generated through carefully developed revision techniques’ that I claimed to have, have disappeared to.

With the beauty of hindsight and the apathy of the average student to grades, with a 2.1 being sweet relief, we can laugh at the naive enthusiasm of our A-Level selves.

As a QUB student, the only transferable ‘skill’ that has come in useful is teamwork or ‘working with people’. Tutorials are like torture chambers, designed to make one hungover student who hasn’t done the compulsory reading o talk with another and expect us to not hate every second of it.

Of course I got these ‘teamwork’ skills from the same place as every other student in the UK who has ever written a personal statement…

Lie#3: Look familiar to anybody?

As students, we have all gone through the tedious and embarrassing task of the creation of a UCAS ‘personal statement’.

Don’t let the apathetic student you have become be too hard on the idealistic A-Level student of your personal statement – they actually thought someone would be reading it!