Ugh! What a nightmare… You’ve spent hours writing your personal statement, brainstorming everything you’ve done that makes you the perfect candidate for your course, crafting an opening sentence and tweaking your words. However, you’re way over the 4,000 character limit that UCAS puts on personal statements and you have no idea what to cut […]
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Just after A-Level results day this year I had an email from a reader of my blog who’d earned straight A*s in her exams and was off to Oxford to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics. However, she was worried. This is what she said: “Did Cambridge live up to your expectations and did you live […]
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You must know by now that you should be reading around your subject/s for two very good reasons: It will help you get into university and is a great thing to write about in your UCAS personal statement It will help you get better grades because you’ll have a deeper and broader understanding of […]
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When you sit down to write your personal statement for the first time it can be really tempting to use age-old cliches like ‘I’ve always been fascinated by…’ or ‘I have a deep and enduring admiration for nurses/doctors/midwives’. However, you can quite easily avoid these cliches and I’m going to show you exactly how in today’s […]
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Are you a hare or a tortoise when it comes to your studies? I’ll tell you why I ask… It’s becasue tortoises tend to win in the end. It’s the people who work steadily all year long – starting the school year in the right way, doing the same amount of work week-in and week-out, […]
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Life gets busy. You may have a part-time job, play in a sports team and belong to a club like guides or venture scouts. It’s hard to fit it all in, and then when something exceptional comes along, like a camp or a weekend sports festival your studies somehow drop to the bottom of the […]
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It’s a question that comes up in the mind of anyone applying to the UK’s premier universities: “How do I stand out from all the other candidates?” The other day, Ami, a reader of my blog, wrote to me and asked me this exact question. Ami said: “I’m applying to Cambridge and to be honest […]
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A while ago, I was talking to one of my readers, we’ll call her Polly. A year ago Polly told me she wanted to study physical natural sciences at Cambridge. At the time she was in the early stages of year 12, doing all the right subjects and was clearly passionate about the subject matter of […]
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It’s a well known fact that it’s not easy to make the transition from GCSE to A Level. A Levels are hard. Really hard in comparison to GCSEs. What’s so hard about them? Well, there’s a number of the things: The quantity of work you need to do The amount of work you need to do […]
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Did you watch any of the Rio Olympics? I loved marvelling at what people can make the human body do with enough training, dedication and determination. The gymastics and diving were mind-blowing and the endurance of long-distance runners like Mo Farah and the triathletes was simply incredible. As I watched I heard things from the […]
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