A while back I said to myself that I was going to spend a couple of hours a week attempting to furiously mock whatever had been on TV in the recent past. Unfortunately this week I’ve essentially not watched enough TV to fulfil this remit, so I don’t have any particular programme to make fun of via humorously constructed similes.
I need something else to write about. But to be fair, as far as I’m aware only about two to five people actually read what I write. I could then just take the liberty of choosing a subject extremely specific to my existence; for instance I might spend a few paragraphs ranting about how ridiculously full the bike racks at college are now that the first years have all decided there is literally no alternative to cycling. But because I’m kind, and also because I can’t think of that much bike-rack related material, I’ll write about something a tad more broad.
It’s heading towards that time of year when the majority of seventeen and eighteen year olds all suddenly realise for the first time in their lives that they have great leadership skills. That’s right, the few months where everyone attempts to write their personal statement. For those of you who have somehow remained oblivious to such a document, the personal statement is where university applicants spend four thousand characters trying to make it seem like having played football in Year 11 proves that they have the dedication and ability to transfer existing skills to new environments. Basically it’s just a big ‘I’m not as terrible as my grades suggest’ plea, optimistically sent to a bunch of universities.
Unavoidably, such a document will always be rich with exaggeration. Because, let’s face it, saying “I played football a bit because tennis club wasn’t on in the winter” doesn’t sound anywhere near as good as the whole dedication and ability lie I wrote in the previous paragraph. The thing is, universities must know this by now and are probably more impressed when someone claims to have little to no communication ability at all, because at least they know the candidate’s honest.
Of course we’re told that those who read our personal statements may be reading hundreds each day, so you have to make yours interesting for it to stand out. In reality, if this is the case these university employees are probably so mind-blowingly bored and alienated that if they read a personal statement that was just a summary of the entire third season of Glee, they’d expressionlessly move it onto the maybe pile without even batting an eyelid (yes, I do imagine they have yes, no and maybe piles).
They don’t just rely on what you say about yourself though: teacher references supposedly have a similar weighting. This is a problem if your tutor is the kind so inattentive that they start a one-to-one conversation with “so you are…?” in the hope that when you say your name and they’ll nod and repeat it quickly enough afterwards to seem like they knew. They look at all your grades as well, which is a shame, because a lot of people I know saw GCSEs as just a glamourized version of SATs in the same way real life is just a glamourized version of playing Xbox. Coincidentally, playing Xbox is just one of the things that many applicants will claim has provided them with an interest in how technology has developed and a strong ability to work alone.
Ultimately though the amount of feedback you’ll get when you write your personal statement will dilute it so heavily that it won’t even be vaguely personal. It’s a bit like a strange, application-based version of Chinese whispers, where what you wanted to write is the initial whisper and what actually gets sent off is the last, strange statement that contains only a few misunderstood fragments of the original and makes everyone in the room laugh when you reveal what you initially said.
So there you go. A blog thing that isn’t about TV. Now to find somewhere to put my bike.
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