We at Personal Statement Service have been glued to our desks for the past week, awaiting (what we’ve predicted we’ll call) the ‘September Rush’. With the fate of 2013 Clearing students sorted and the beginning of future destinies paved, we had a short while to talk to one another, to make excessive amounts of tea and coffee and dwell on the individual students we have helped to get on to their chosen course. There’s also been the fairly entertaining ‘Dear Freshers’ Facebook page being spread around and ‘liked’ left, right and centre over the past few days. With Jack Whitehall as his Fresh Meat character ‘JP’ being the profile picture of this page, it has obviously drawn interest from numerous (and probably nervous) students to-be. One post reads, ‘Every student flat will have a person who vents their anger by leaving notes on the fridge. If you can't think which of your flat mates it is, it's you’. Another, ‘Drunk you will create awkward situations for sober you’. For those of you about to embark upon what we will call your Fresher’s Career, we understand that whilst these posts may stir up that insecurity you thought you had on lock-down, no two university experiences are the same and therefore don’t go with the intention to plan your actions around them (although, in the case of these particular two posts, almost all of us at Personal Statement Service can vouch for their general truth).

As you can see, the past few days has held a lot of amusement for us whilst we wait for the September onslaught of students requiring help for their 2014 Personal Statements, and it’s probably time we thought about them, rather than the ones we’ve already given a helping hand to. We thought we’d therefore give you some advice on how you can help us help you ‘ after all, we can’t read your mind, however skilled our writers are. The most important things are desire and personality. You have your grades, predicted or official, and therefore providing us with only a list of achievements is hindering how accurately we can represent you. For students who are to go on to create insightful Facebook pages such as ‘Dear Freshers’, for example, there’s something about you that’s different, and we want to know what ‘ what inspires you in life, who do you look up to, what do you believe in? These sound like high-and-mighty questions, but interpret them as you will ‘ the more honest and genuine the answer, the more we can understand about you, and the better a tutor will grasp a sense of what you’re about through your personal statement. If you’re also not sure why you’re applying for a certain course, for your own sake it’s probably time to re-think ‘ no one else is doing this degree for you, and as we well know, three or four years can easily turn into wasted potential if you study a subject you don’t care about all that much. Granted, Fresh Meat is probably not the best programme to be highlighting in this blog, or for you to use as a guide to choosing a course ‘ Vod has never read a book before and yet ‘studies’, and fails to study, English ‘ but it does then stand as a useful example of what not to do. On the other hand, if you have genuine interest in your subject, tell us why, tell us what it offers you and what you can offer back. To see the wide variety of statements we write, visit our ‘Examples’ page here.

On an end-note, we’d like to wish the best to the new ‘Freshers’ of 2013 and hope that they don’t take the ‘Dear Freshers’ Facebook page too seriously. We also hope that this blog will have given 2014’s ‘fresh meat’ a little insight into how to write a personal statement, and how we at Personal Statement Service can help them to the best of our ability in the September Rush and beyond.