The personal statement

As American parents living in Britain, my husband, Daniel, and I had naïvely thought we could avoid the United States college admissions frenzy. But with friends and relatives back home signing up their teenagers for enrichment programs, cultural immersion experiences and “personal statement” courses, we started to catch the same airborne disease. I worried I was becoming one of those determined adults who forget their own idyllic summers of canoeing and candle-making at camp and start thinking about sending off their children to be marketing managers in Mumbai so the Ivy admissions officers will be impressed.

--The Zeus Trip

The personal statement（英國申請大學的自由發揮”論文”） is a very important part of the application. It gives candidates a chance to write freely about themselves and their interest in the subject, as opposed to the rest of the application which consists mainly of 'objective' information. The statement can form the basis of an interview discussion. A personal statement can be up to 4,000 characters (including spaces)^[2] and 47 lines^[3]. It can be compared with the admissions essay in the United States.