Every autumn, as the fruit fills with ripeness to the core and the small gnats mourn among the river sallows, my inbox fills with requests for help from parents whose children have been tasked with writing an essay of 4,000 characters in which they explain to their prospective universities why they want to study a given subject. Except that, unable to articulate why they want to study English at Nottingham, they have begun to question why, when it comes down to it, they do anything at all.
Obviously, this is good preparation for the working world. This all-consuming angst will return in later life whenever they write a cover letter for a job. But for the time being they have me on hand to cobble their thoughts into some kind of structure, sprinkle in a few platitudes, and have them sounding impressive in no time.
Since its introduction in 1993, the Ucas personal statement has been a boon for private tutors such as me. Over the years these statements have become as tired and hackneyed as the tutors whose wallets they have fattened. I can’t remember what I wrote in my own statement; that in itself says more than enough about how authentically personal it must have been. But, had I not erased it from my mind and hard drive, I imagine it would have resembled that of everyone in my peer group and, indeed, those I now encourage my students to write.
I would probably have begun with an attention-grabbing personal anecdote in which I explained how I first discovered my “passion” for my subject. A friend whose parents split up when she was young, for instance, opened by explaining how she discovered her love for English literature when she would wait for her mother to finish waitressing shifts, passing the time by reading books and eating stale bread rolls. Her teacher was so wowed by this that she thrust the essay on to another girl who immediately burst into tears, presumably because she came from a stable nuclear family and had no way of emulating such a captivating story. A rare example of when childhood divorce can actually pay dividends.
Next, I would have verbosely justified why my subject is worthwhile. It’s here that I really mourn the loss of my original statement, as I was a past master in pretension. I had recently read James Joyce, so I would probably have said something like, “Literature is the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man,” when, of course, what I really meant was I got a decent grade in it at GCSE.
No personal statement would be complete without a self-aggrandising description of an otherwise trivial sporting or extracurricular achievement, but my only extracurricular activity was smoking. So I would probably have gone straight to another trope of the genre: the fawning statement of how humbled I would be to study at my chosen institutions. A friend and fellow tutor quoted the Pixies to sum up the dramatic transformation he wanted to undergo at university: “I want you to break my body and hold my bones,” he told them. He didn’t get in.
Of course, there’s always authenticity in any personal statement, and it’s a pleasure getting to know the students I work with. But the form forces them to drown their personality beneath a flood of cliches. Because the personal statement contains within it an irreconcilable contradiction. Unlike in 1993, most students nowadays actually need a university degree. They simply couldn’t get a job without one. And, even though that’s the most personal statement many of them could make, it’s the one thing they can’t admit. And so they scramble for other reasons, panicking all the while because these invariably sound affected. Unless they can pay for someone like me to listen and assure them their statements can be cliched because, frankly, admissions tutors barely read them, they are bound to suffer a minor nervous breakdown.
Soon, however, my services will be obsolete. Ucas has announced that, from 2025, instead of submitting a personal statement, students will have to answer three questions about their motivations, qualifications and extracurricular activities. Since it’s easier to answer questions than it is to write a freeform essay, this new format will benefit students who can’t afford tutoring. But will this really foster “equity and inclusion”, as Ucas intends? The new regime will still favour students whose parents have the time and money to invest in piano lessons or fencing club, or whose school libraries are well stocked enough to allow them to read around their subject.
Even so, the changes are an improvement, and not only because they will rid us of such tortured prose. Farewell then, personal statement. You benefited nobody more than me, and even I will be fine without you. If my work drops off, I will just take that law conversion that I have been delaying. Which is just as well, because I have always known that is what I wanted to do, ever since that time when I was a child and …
Never mind. I’ve got a year to think of something to write.
Max Fletcher is a London-based writer
