Picking up on my previous post, I lastly mentioned how I started working on the application process, predominantly on the personal statement and references. Within one week, I remember having finished my first draft of the personal statement and obtained approval from two of my lecturers to use them as my referees in the application form.
As admission teams makes their decision on your suitability to join their university based mostly on your personal statement and reference letters, the content of the latter depends mostly on your referees description of you. You can make the most of your application by ensuring that your personal statement highlights your true self. In this case, a first draft is never followed by the final version, but more or less by at least two or three other drafts. Taking this advice, I decided to circulate my first draft of the personal statement to a few people who I believed could guide my choice of words and ideas so as to better represent myself in the eyes of the admission team. Thus, I chose to share it with my referees and my English teacher to check for grammar and vocabulary mistake while also asking two of my friends who I believed knew me better than I knew myself sometimes to offer feedback.
Following this, it is needless to say that my first draft of the personal statement was all marked up in red from each of the people I sent it to and it was now my turn to consider their input and decide what I would like to keep and what I should change. Furthermore, I repeated the whole process two more times, thus, improving the message I wanted to send out about myself. By the end of October, I already had the personal statement prepared and ready to be uploaded onto the application portal and my lecturers’ agreement to recommend me to the universities I wanted to apply to.
In addition to the above, there is one more thing that I finally decided on: choosing my top 5 preferred universities and the degrees that I wanted to apply for. Having consulted many league tables on university rankings and contacting some students who had already started studying at various universities across the UK, helped me refine my options and make my decision.
Retrospectively, I believe that I was already half way through the application process by the end of October as all that there was left for me to do consisted of completing the personal information section in the application. At that time, I looked forward to November as I knew that I would finally get to press the submit button and wait for the universities to reply.