December 9, 2023 ; Catergory: admissions
Several times now I’ve volunteered to help look over personal statements for prospective applicants to Computer Science courses. Alongside giving feedback, I’ve often sent over documents going over additional advice. These documents however are very old at this point, not very well laid out and generally not as useful as they could be. So this is what this post is for - to lay out all my advice on the table. Next time someone asks for advice, I’ll just send them this post.
Before touching on content, I want to focus on how that content is delivered. A common weakness across CS personal statements is their inability to effectively communicate themselves to a reader. This makes sense really. I haven’t met many CS students who speak fondly of writing essays after all, and many end up dropping all essay-based subjects going into A-levels. However, its really important that your presentation is on point and clear. It wont really matter how good your content is if its buried in messy, meandering ramblings.
Your personal statement needs to answer the following question: “Why should you be chosen to study Computer Science at your chosen universities?”. You’re first and foremost writing a persuasive piece. Something that is meant to move a professor to agree that you’re worth taking on. Keep this in mind at all times when writing your statement. When inserting sections, you should ask how it relates back to this central question and whether it makes a good case for why you should be picked to study at the universities of your choice. When reading back drafts, consider if you’d be convinced by your piece. Does it adequately communicate your passion? Does it adequately communicate your expertise? Do you stand out in some way? If the answer to any of these ends up a “no”, it’s a strong sign to revise your work.
To help set the direction of your essay it’s imperative to have an overarching thesis. The thesis is your answer to the question, alongside the supporting evidence to your answer. It generally lives in the opening of your essay and serves as a high level overview of your answer to the central question. It’s helpful for the professor as they know from the start what your essay entails. It’s also helpful for yourself use in framing the rest of your essay when writing it. In general I’d suggest having a strong idea of your thesis before you start writing.
If your unsure of what could constitute a thesis, first ask yourself why it is exactly you care about your subject enough to want to study it further at university. What do you hope to achieve by studying it? If that still isn’t helpful, it’s worth seeing how the things you’ve read, watched and done can be tied together under a common theming or idea.
In general a CS thesis should revolve around the specific interests and perspective you hold that makes you stand out. This is attempted by many people. An example statement might say, “I’m interested in the applications of CS to the financial sector, and how it can positively impact the world”. This itself is fine. If the rest of the sections relate back to this thesis then you do end up with a cohesive essay. However we can improve it. Firstly it would be important to be more specific about CS’s positive effect through finance. We could add, “It’s been key to skyrocketing the creation of economic value, which in turn allows for greater downstream effects that come with increased prosperity”. We could then talk later about research we had done into these positive effects with a focus on the technological aspects that lead to it. Further, it would be nice if we could elaborate on how the other sections of our essay that are coming up relate to this thesis. “My interest has led me into researching the mechanics of blockchain currencies, developing a bot that tracks the prices of graphic cards over time, and watching lectures by financial companies to understand their underlying systems”. Now we have a fully fleshed out thesis, ready to serve both yourself and your reader.
As a general rule of thumb, an essay should never be hard to parse as a reader. If a professor is lost in where you’re going with a paragraph, or doesn’t know what you’re trying to say, it’ll serve as a serious blow to their confidence in you. To combat this you ought to signpost your work. Signposting, broadly, is the act if clearly delineating the point of a section in your essay. It helps to provide a roadmap to the reader to know where you’re going with each section. I notice that many students make attempts to this end. Often, a section starts with something along the lines of “This then lead me to look into X”, which does tell me what you’ll be talking about, but not what aspect specifically, or why it’s relevant to the overall thesis. In the same way that your thesis acts as a roadmap, a signpost should do a similar thing on a smaller scale. Briefly explain a section’s relevance so the point is clear when reading the rest of the section.
On a side note, links are great to make at the start of sections alongside a signpost. Most students tend to achieve this by linking back to the previous section for a sense of flow. This is certainly good in the cases where you can directly link ideas, but often I see very strenuous links being made between sections that only serve to make transitions awkward. You don’t need to do this though! With a strong enough thesis it can serve as a rock to latch points onto. It’s equally valid to link back to your thesis instead. You may worry about flow, but since the rest of your essay should also relate to your central thesis, it ends up fitting in with the content alongside it.
One of my pet peeves in personal statements is unnecessary verbosity. It’s seemingly not enough to be interested, one must be “immensely interested”. One must also, on multiple occasions, bring up how fascinated they were by a given topic, as if to admit the section they wrote hadn’t adequately conveyed their passion. Every other word has an associated smart-sounding adverb or adjective. It’s not “an example”; its an “extraordinary example”. I’m sceptical of the actual use of these modifying terms to boost the quality of your work. If you’re using it to convey intellect, you’re doing the opposite. Academia is more concerned with conciseness and clarity than it is about how fancy the wordage is. It reads as amateurish, which is not ideal when you’re proving your academic worth to a university. Since you only have a limited amount of space, its usually never worth keeping these in, and it should be priority to remove wherever possible (so long as the key idea conveyed isn’t altered).
Its very easy when writing an essay to become invested in how you’ve already structured and presented your argument. Some mixture of the sunk cost fallacy and an ignorance that you can do better often leaves the structure you started with being the structure you finish off with. If you deliberately thought about the many ways you could structure your essay, and concluded that the one you chose is the best out of the options then you might be justified but most people do not do this. Playing around with your structuring is oftentimes a good way to drastically improve the flow, and impact of your essay without actually changing anything content wise. I myself did this halfway through my own process and it led to a drastic improvement in how engaging it was to read.
Now we get onto the meat of the statement itself: the content. As a general starting point it should be noted that the personal statement isn’t really about impressing a professor with how much you know, or how many awards you’ve won etc. Depending on how you expand on and present your topics, talking simply about an NEA you worked on, or a website you made can equally do the job of conveying your passion and academic interests.
In my mind there is a strong difference between being a coder and being a computer scientist. A computer scientist first and foremost is interested in the theory behind computing, and its related sub-doctrines. One could do an entire CS degree without coding once. As such while having a personal statement solely focused on the practical is fine, especially if the universities you’re applying to are more practically focused, it’s much more preferable to speak on your academic interest in CS. After all, you are applying to an academic institution. If you’re wondering how you might go about talking about academics in a more personal manner, I’d suggest reading a blog post by Toby Lam, an Oxford student studying Mathematics. His article is focused on maths personal statements but is certainly applicable to CS ones.
Oftentimes students’ personal statements read like a ‘greatest-hits’ collection of just about everything they could think of that relates in any way to CS. A rapid fire collection, however, doesn’t tell a professor much of anything about you and your own personal engagement with CS. In general a good personal statement will comment on very little, about 2-4 main topics which are strongly fleshed out. Its not enough to explain what you did. You need to explain how you relate to it, how it’s informed you academically, how it links back to your thesis and how you learnt and grew from the experience. Passion shines through in your ability to engage deeply with a topic. Be critical and active. If you’ve read a book or watched a lecture, you may want to expand on what they said, or use it to link into others things (showing your ability to synthesise information and come up with novel ideas). Maybe you even disagree with their viewpoints. For example, maybe you bring up a Ted talk on the singularity1 that you’ve watched, only to disagree with its premises - perhaps because you disagree that an artificial general intelligence is feasible. Critical engagement with the field is a very strong sign that you are academically engaged with the discipline at hand. But to do this requires significant space in your essay, which is why you only end up with room for 2-4 topics. It ends up being worth it however, as it speaks much more kindly of your academic prowess than listing off 100 achievements back to back with no explanation.
As mentioned in the section about “Writing with purpose”, your personal statement seeks to answer a single specific question: “Why should you be chosen to study Computer Science at your chosen universities?”. In arguing your case, you should not bring up examples of activities that you cannot tie back to CS. DofE unfortunately doesn’t count unless your skills based section revolved around something CS related (even in this case however there isn’t much relevance in mentioning it was for DofE). In general I find that when students do bring up less relevant examples, it’s usually a symptom of another issue; either being that they either don’t have much to talk about, or they don’t talk about what they’ve already included in enough depth. If you catch yourself inserting non-CS related sections it should be a sign to look at problems elsewhere in your statement.
A nice consequence of only bringing up CS related topics is that it becomes very easy to tie them back into the central thesis of your essay. Another issue I notice with those who include non-CS related sections is that their personal statements often lose focus by this stage as they can’t tie these ideas back into the rest of the essay, leaving a meandering structure. When your examples are CS only, you avoid this issue as they directly relate to the central question and will always feel inherently more cohesive to the narrative you’re constructing.
Always keep in mind your audience. Many times in student’s personal statements they’ll stop to explain the technical details of a well-known aspect of computer science. This is a waste of space. Your reader is a professor, they are acutely aware of the details of almost all well-known aspects of computer science, and in general their expertise is vast. This obviously isn’t an invitation to never explain things. There’s an opposite problem of assuming too much of a professor (or more likely, forgetting that most people aren’t as knowledgeable on certain sub-cultures or topics as you are) and whenever you do bring up something its worth asking yourself if your reader needs context or not. Space is precious so only add detail when you have to.
Sometimes it’s hard to know where you should be looking for extracurricular engagement with CS, so in this final section I’ll list some helpful resources for you to check out:
1 Singularity is the idea that Artificial General Intelligences (AGIs) - AIs that are able to vastly outperform the best human brains in practically every field (Bostrom, 1998) - are not only feasible, but coming soon and pose a significant threat to humanity.