gap year personal statement

Gap Year Personal Statement Examples

1 Personal Statement Example Links
2 Gap Year Benefits for your Personal Statement
3 Gap Year: What are my options?
4 Can I afford a Gap Year?
5 Should You Take a Gap Year?

Personal Statement Example Links

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Ever been intrigued by the idea of taking a pause from traditional education or work paths to explore new horizons? Fascinated by the prospect of personal development, gaining real-world experience, or simply broadening your perspective through travel?

If so, a Gap Year could be your ideal journey. This unique opportunity enables you to pursue interests, grow personally, and gain life experience outside the classroom or workplace

Gap years are a great way to take time off from traditional education and explore the world. Whether you’re looking to gain work experience, travel, volunteer, or simply take a break, a gap year can be an incredibly rewarding experience.

👍 When writing a personal statement : Highlight your passion for the course, demonstrating your understanding of it. Use relevant personal experiences, coursework, or work history to showcase how these have fostered your interest and readiness for the course.

Gap Year Benefits for your Personal Statement

Taking a Gap Year before starting university can have many benefits for students. Some of the advantages include:

Personal and professional growth: A Gap Year can provide students with the opportunity to explore their interests, develop new skills, and gain valuable work experience. This can help them to become more confident, independent, and better prepared for university and beyond.
Cultural experience: Many students choose to travel during their Gap Year, which can expose them to different cultures and ways of life. This can broaden their perspective and help them to develop a deeper understanding and appreciation of other cultures.
Improved academic performance: Studies have shown that students who take a Gap Year tend to have higher GPAs and are more likely to graduate within four years.
Improved career prospects: Students who take a Gap Year may have a better understanding of their career goals and are more likely to pursue internships or work experiences that align with their interests and aspirations.

Gap Year: What are my options?

Some popular choices for Gap Year activities include volunteering, internships, language immersion programs, adventure travel, and cultural exchange programs.

In terms of whether taking a Gap Year is good, bad, or does not make a difference, it ultimately depends on the individual student and their goals. For some students, a Gap Year can be a valuable and transformative experience, while for others, it may not be necessary or feasible.

Can I afford a Gap Year?

The cost of a Gap Year can vary widely depending on the activities chosen and the location. Some students may choose low-cost options such as volunteering or working while others may opt for more expensive activities such as travel or language immersion programs. It is important to research the costs associated with each option and to create a budget before embarking on a Gap Year.

Should You Take a Gap Year?

A uni gap year is an increasingly popular choice for students looking to take a break from their studies and explore the world.

A Gap Year is a valuable opportunity to gain new skills, explore new cultures, and develop as a person.

If you have taken a Gap Year before starting university, it is essential to include this experience in your personal statement.

By including your Gap Year experience in your personal statement, you can demonstrate to the university admissions team that you are a well-rounded individual who has taken the initiative to pursue your interests and passions beyond academics.

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Your chance of acceptance, your chancing factors, extracurriculars, how do i explain a gap year on my college applications.

I took a gap year after high school and I'm worried about how it will look on my college applications. How can I explain my gap year in a positive way so it doesn't hurt my chances of getting accepted?

It's great that you're considering how to present your gap year in a positive light on your college applications. Many students take gap years, and colleges are often open to these experiences, as long as they are framed constructively.

First, consider what you did during your gap year. If you engaged in any meaningful activities, such as volunteering, internships, or personal projects, make sure to highlight these experiences in your application. You can include them in the 'Activities' section or even write an essay about how they influenced your personal growth.

If your gap year was more focused on personal circumstances, like family commitments or health issues, it's important to be honest about this. You can briefly explain the situation in the 'Additional Information' section of your application. Just remember to focus on how you've grown and what you've learned from the experience, rather than dwelling on any negative aspects.

Good luck with your applications!

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Personal Statements
Gap year personal statement

Your Gap Year

When it comes to taking a gap year you have two options – to take it before you begin university, or to take it during your time at university. Luckily, whichever option you choose will look good on paper.

Universities like to see that their students have life experience outside of their academic career and a gap year is the perfect chance to pick up new skills, take part in different activities, and see a little bit more of life.

Gap years prove to universities that you’re ready for a new adventure and like to take on a challenge. These are positive personal attributes for potential university students and can make you stand out from the crowd.

However, there are some definite dos and don’ts when talking about your gap year in your personal statement. The admissions tutors will want to hear either about what you did during your gap year, or what you intend to do if you haven’t already taken it.

You don’t have to focus your personal statement on your gap year but a few sentences or a short paragraph near the end of your application outlining your plans will show the reader that you’ve thought about what you’ll be doing.

It doesn’t matter if you’re going to be spending the time working to gain relevant experience in your subject or whether you’re travelling, as long as you show the admissions tutor that you have a plan and know what you will gain from taking the time out of education.

What you do on your gap year is completely up to you but most universities would warn you off wasting your time. Lying on a beach for an entire year might sound like a great reward for all your hard work at school, but you won’t gain anything from it.

It’s important to have a break but taking the time to volunteer for a community project, learn a new skill or language, and gaining valuable vocational experience will get you ahead of the game when the time comes to apply for/or return to university.

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How to write the best personal statement

A great personal statement will help your university application stand out and get those offers rolling in. We cover everything you need to know about writing your personal statement.

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A personal statement is meant to show off YOU. You’ll need to think about why you want to study the course you’re applying for, what you’ve done to work towards that already, what transferable skills you have and what you want to do after university. It’s a lot to think about and squish into the strict UCAS character and line limit, but don’t worry, we’ve got all the tips and advice you could want.

Personal statement all finished? Read more about applying to university.

CONTENTS:

When’s the deadline to finish my personal statement?
How to get started on your personal statement
Tailoring your personal statement to your subject choice
How to structure your personal statement
What to include in your personal statement

Can you use AI when writing your personal statement?

Things to avoid in your personal statement , how long should your personal statement be .

How to edit your personal statement

Are you ready to submit your personal statement?

Ucas proposed reform , when’s the deadline to finish my personal statement .

The UCAS deadline for 2024 entry is 31 January 2024 at 6pm UK time. You can submit applications after this, but you won’t be covered by the Equal Consideration Policy and some courses may be full. Any applications received after 6pm on 30 June 2024 will be entered into Clearing.

It’s best to have your personal statement drafted a couple of weeks before the deadline so you have time to get feedback on it and edit it.

How to get started on your personal statement

Before you even think about writing, you’ll have to research the courses you’re applying for. This can give you some inspiration on what to write about, and if you see you’ve already covered some of the first-year material, even better.

After research comes planning. You’ll want to plan out paragraph by paragraph what you’re going to include to make sure you don’t repeat yourself or miss anything out.

If you have your research and plan completed, it’s time to start writing!

How to start writing your personal statement.

Tailoring your personal statement to your subject choice

Admissions tutors want to see why you’d be a good fit for the course you’ve applied for on your personal statement, so you’ll want to make sure the things you’re mentioning link back to the course you’ve applied to. For example, if you’re applying to study psychology, there’s not much point going on about how much you love watching Great British Bake Off. However, if you’re a huge fan of Milton’s Paradise Lost and you’re applying to study English literature, that’s a great thing to mention.

Not everything you mention has to be directly linked to your chosen course, but it should either link or demonstrate transferable skills useful to university study such as time management, leadership, balancing responsibilities or independent research.

Tailoring your university personal statement to your subject

How to structure your personal statement

There’s no set way you have to structure your personal statement, but if you read a few examples online, you’ll probably notice a bit of a pattern occurring. The main thing to do is to open your personal statement by introducing yourself and why you want to study the course you’re applying to. You might then want to talk about:

Your academic qualifications
Any work experience or volunteering
Extracurricular activities
Any reading you’ve done around your subject (and what you learned from that reading!).

A good way to close your personal statement is to talk about what you’d like to do after university, and how the subject you’re applying for will help you get there.

Ashley Harrison-Barker, Home Admissions Manager at University of Hertfordshire , says "We want you to give us a summary of you as an individual and your journey up until this point... Think of it as a timeline that explains your journey to-date and how you would use this course as a springboard to achieve your desired career aspirations."

How to structure your personal statement.

What to include in your personal statement

Your personal statement should be just that – personal! Exactly what you should include depends on what you’ve done. However, some areas that you might want to cover in your personal statement include:

Work experience
Part-time work or volunteering
What you’re studying now
What topics within the subject particularly interest you
Your future career goals
Extracurricular activities or reading you’ve done relevant to your course

Simone Wilson, Careers Manager at Wirral Grammar School for Boys, says it's important to, "explain what interests you about particular topics and how you have gone above and beyond to learn more about it."

Essential topics to include in your personal statement.

ChatGPT and AI is a hot topic right now, so you might be wondering whether it can help you write your personal statement. In short, you have to be careful if you’re using AI to help you with your personal statement.

Your personal statement must be original work, which means you can’t copy and paste chunks from an AI. UCAS checks personal statements and can detect AI-written content, so using AI-generated paragraphs could harm your application. As Harrison-Barker says, "AI won’t know all your personal experiences so there is no substitute for the real thing."

However, AI can be helpful for the planning stage as it can generate personal statement examples that you can use for inspiration on what to cover and how to structure your own personal statement. It can also help you to brainstorm topics related to your subject that you could relate to your experience when it comes to writing your personal statement.

Using AI and ChatGPT when writing your personal statement.

It probably goes without saying that you shouldn’t use any inappropriate language such as swear words in your personal statement. You should also avoid slang, or language that comes across as too informal (the admissions tutor is not your ‘mate’).

Be wary of using cliches or buzzwords if you don’t have the experience and evidence to back them up, and of course you should avoid lying about anything. It’s also wise to avoid discussing anything that you can’t link to either the subject you’re applying to study, or a transferable skill you learned that’ll be useful at university.

Words you should never use in your university application.

The limit for your UCAS personal statement is 4,000 characters (not words!) including spaces or 47 lines, whichever comes first. To check the length of your personal statement, copy and paste it into the UCAS application form as character count may vary a little bit between your word processing program and UCAS, and the only way to check your line count is to put it into the application form.

Read more about the length requirements for personal statements .

How to edit your personal statement

Once you’ve got a first draft of your personal statement, it’s time to get feedback and redraft. One of the first things you’ll want to do is check how it compares to the UCAS character and line limit. You can’t go over the limit, but you want to get as much in as possible.

You’ll also want to show it to a few people and get some feedback. You could ask your parents, friends or a teacher at school to read it over for you – the more eyes you can get on it the better. It’s good to show your personal statement to whoever is writing your UCAS reference so they can mention some of the things you’ve put into your personal statement.

You’ll need to proofread it to make sure it all makes sense and there aren’t any spelling or grammar errors before you send off your final draft.

How to tell if your university application is good.

Have you drafted, redrafted and drafted your personal statement again? Have you checked for any spelling and grammar mistakes? Have you got a few people to look it over and give you feedback? If you answered yes to all of these questions and your personal statement fits within the UCAS character and line limit, all that’s left to do is go through our application checklist and send it off…

University application checklist.

For 2026 entry onwards, UCAS are changing the way the university application process works. For those applying for entry in 2024 or 2025, the personal statement will not be changing. We’ll bring you more information about the application reform when UCAS release the details of the updated process.

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How to write about your gap year

You have just submitted your primary application and after a brief respite, the secondary essays begin to flood in. Do not fret! With a little practice and patience, you will be churning out these essays! It can be easy, however, to become overwhelmed with the task at hand. My advice is to begin writing some of the more straightforward essays to help you boost your confidence and get the ball moving. A great place to start is the prompt about your gap year. Here are a few tips and misconceptions to guide you through this common secondary prompt.

Tip #1: Be Straightforward

In many cases for this essay, you will have very little space to describe what you are doing or plan to do. As such, do not add flowery language and get to the point as quickly as possible. Your main goals here are to (1) tell your reviewers what it is that you are doing/plan to do and (2) what you have learned/hope to learn. Ideally you want to focus on the latter and explain how these extra years will eventually align with your goals of becoming a physician.

Tip #2: This is Not your last chance

One thing that is often not known (or is simply forgotten) is that these secondary essays are not your last opportunity to update your schools about what is happening/what you are learning during your gap year. Throughout the admissions process, applicants are often encouraged to write update letters to the schools (just double check that each of your schools accepts update letters). This secondary is a great chance to tell the schools the things that you are working on now and what you have learned from them.

Misconception #1: It is not okay to “just work on myself”

Something that many applicants do during their gap years is work on their candidacy – most commonly working on their MCAT score. However, something that might be feared at this point in the cycle is that this information is not enough for this essay. However, medical school is a lot about resilience and overcoming obstacles. Therefore, talking about the plan and approach you have taken to strengthen your application is a valid approach for this essay! Ideally, your plan worked and you did in fact achieve your goals; so, talking about what you have learned in the process is absolutely helpful in showing your ability to go through medical school and become a doctor.

Misconception #2: It is not okay to do something non-medical

While many people spend their gap years doing something that is “easily defendable” in terms of its relation to a future in medicine, others may do something completely different. All the above is great! The most important thing to do in this essay is to talk about what you have learned and how it will make you a better physician in the long run.

Now, if you have taken many years off and have not touched the field of medicine for any of those years, it may be more difficult to defend why you are applying to medical school. If you are going through this scenario, my advice is to try to have something even remotely related to medicine going on in the background. Your primary focus of your gap year(s) can be unrelated to medicine, but make sure you have some kind of touchpoint with the medical field during that time, even if it's in a very limited capacity.

Pav graduated magna cum laude with a BSE in Chemical and Biological Engineering and minors in Engineering Biology and Global Health Policy from Princeton. He is now an MD-PhD student at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Should I write a new commonapp/personal statement essay during a gap year?

I’m an international student who applied to last year’s application cycle and got rejected or waitlisted from every school. I want to take a gap year and try applying to the United States one more time.

My question is: should I write a new personal statement for the next application cycle? I think my last year’s personal statement was fine. It may not have been the best, but it probably wasn’t the reason I got rejected. Some of my friends and my English teacher reviewed it, and they liked it. Also, I asked for a review here, and @compmom reviewed it and said it was good.

My concern is, even if it was the best essay ever written, wouldn’t it still look bad to not change it during the gap year? Let’s say if the admissions officer reads it and thinks, “Huh, I’ve read it somewhere,” checks my last year’s essay, and it is exactly the same. Wouldn’t that be a red flag? On top of that, I am not that good of a writer, so I don’t think if I write a new essay it will be any better than my last year’s.

So right now, I think I have three options:

1.Leave my essay as it is (maybe make slight changes). 2.Leave the topic and structure the same but try to rewrite and make it better. 3.Write a completely new essay.

What should I do?

I would recommend writing a completely new essay. Many schools will have your previous app.

What are your gap year plans?

I think it is unlikely that your essay is the reason for not getting in. If you take a gap year and your new experiences move you to write something, fine, but otherwise I think your essays were fine.

I have heard from several international students whose applications and essays seemed stellar to me, many with challenges due to violence and war- who did not get in to desired schools. It is important to know that most schools are non need-blind and financial need may affect admissions. Not always of course.

Need blind schools are Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Dartmouth, Bowdoin, Amherst and in 2025 Brown- to the best of my knowledge. Of course international students get into other schools and receive aid. it’s just more competitive.

Did you apply to safety schools? You might also research scholarship programs that fit your situation, some of which are offered by universities.

IMO that’s a different issue than OP re-applying to a school that denied them the previous year with the same essay.

I do think as OP referenced that some AOs would see using the same essay as lazy and/or not see any meaningful difference between the new app and the app that led to the denial.

Are you saying that they would compare the applications from this year and next? You could be right. I had assumed not.

I do think that a gap year should result in some new experiences and insights to share in an essay …

I just want to say, again, that I don’t think essays, in this case, were a reason for rejection.

Some schools will definitely look at the previous app.

Well that answers that. Write new essays!

I agree that it probably wasn’t the essay. But yes, write a new one.

Unless you do something pretty substantial and meaningful in your gap year, reapplying to the same colleges is unlikely to lead to admission. They will know you applied before. They may or may not look at the previous application, but you’re going to want something new to add because the old app was not compelling enough to admit you.

As a gap year applicant, you will have plenty of free time on your hands. Obviously a job is always good, but if you applied to highly selective schools, a job alone probably isn’t going to move the needle without involvement in something that is important to you. It should make you stand out in a notable way.

And finances probably won’t change. I do think that is a factor in many of these situations.

Yes, if OP need significant aid that makes affordable US admissions difficult…and means there would be no safety schools in the US.

Are you planning to apply to the same schools again? I would suggest that you revise your college application list. Sure, include some favorite from round one…but craft mostly a different set of colleges when you apply again. If you do this, the adcoms won’t have seen your first essay.

Still…hopefully you will be doing something worthwhile during you gap year…and this possibly could make a re-write a good thing!

Presumably you have gained new experience and grown a little during the gap year and will have new things to share, it absolutely be best for you to write about the gap year experience.

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