Your Guide to Super-Curricular Activities
Your Guide to Super-Curricular Activities
An article explaining the power of super-curriculars and how you can use them to boost your university application, written by an Oxford Graduate.
There is one sure-fire way to increase your chances of getting a place at your dream university.
What is this? Super-curricular activities.
What are super-curricular activities?
Super-curricular activities are those which involve taking your subject of interest further than you would in the classroom.
What are examples of super-curricular activities?
One of the most popular super-curricular activities chosen by applicants is reading books. For most, if not all, degrees, reading will be an essential component of the degree, especially for essay-based subjects. Therefore, it is important to highlight that you can learn from books (yes, even scientists must learn from textbooks from time to time). For science students, there are many popular science books for you to read - a simple Google search will provide you with the best books to read for your subject. Popular science books are often written for the masses, therefore, they are easy to digest and understand. For humanities and social science subjects, books become even more important as it is likely that you will spend the majority of your degree reading them. Therefore, reading widely around your interests is key and will allow you to engage in insightful discussions about your passions if you are offered an interview.
However, books are not the only option! Other super-curricular activities include:
Podcasts - there are millions of podcasts on nearly every topic you can dream of. This can be a super easy way to learn more about your subject of interest daily.
Articles/Academic Papers - there are plenty of paper magazines and online journals for you to dig your teeth into. Here are a non-exhaustive list of examples:
Sciences: New Scientist, Nature, National Science Review, Scientific Reports. You can also find subject specific articles, for example, Astrophysical Journal and Journal of Molecular Biology and many more.
Humanities & Social Sciences: Wiley, New Statesman, BBC History Revealed, The Financial Times, National Geographic.
Documentaries - you can find a whole range of documentaries on BBC, Netflix, Curiosity Stream and even YouTube.
Online/In-person Lectures - many universities will conduct open lectures for people to attend in-person or online so take a look at their websites. Past lectures may also be uploaded to YouTube.
Societies - search on local forums to see if any societies exist that are related to your subject of interest. If not, you could set one up. You can also find online communities with similar interests on platforms such as quester.io and Discord.
Work Experience - Although this is unnecessary for most degrees, more vocational courses, such as Medicine and Veterinary Medicine, may require it.
Museums - Something as easy as taking a leisurely weekend trip to the museum can provide you with excellent topics for discussion in a personal statement.
EPQs / Research Projects / Welsh Baccalaureate - these are often provided by your school as an additional project to complete alongside your pre-university qualifications. This is a great chance to highlight your passion for the subject and the ability to work independently.
Essay/Subject Competitions - Examples include: Olympiads, UKMT, Gould Prize For Essays In English Literature and many more. A Google search will give you plenty of options.
Engaging in a wide variety of super-curricular activities can contribute towards highlighting the passion for your subject. When choosing super-curricular activities to get involved in, no activity is viewed as more valuable than another so choose those that you enjoy the most. It’s the way you discuss these activities in your personal statement that counts.
How can I integrate these activities into my personal statement to ensure you stand out?
The key to writing a strong and competitive personal statement is to highlight your ability to think both critically and analytically. The best way to do this is to take some time to reflect during and after every super-curricular activity you do. Keep a notebook or create a document where you can store all your thoughts as you go along. This way, all the information you need to bring together in your personal statement is kept in one place.
Make notes on the following questions:
What did you find most interesting?
Were you shocked by something you learnt?
Did you learn something you didn’t know before?
Did something you learnt trigger you to learn more about this topic from a different forum?
What were your initial assumptions on the topic and how did this change as you learnt more about it?
Did a piece of information you came across contradict another piece of information you found? If so, why might this contradiction be the case?
An example of linking super-curriculars can be seen in the following paragraph from my Biochemistry Personal Statement:
“After reading an article in the New Scientist about the link between menopause and Alzheimer’s, I have decided to complete my Welsh Baccalaureate individual project on the reasons for the prevalence difference of Alzheimer’s between men and women. At first I thought it was due to the general longer life of women compared to men. The statistics surrounding gender prevalence, however, showed such an extreme difference that the longevity factor alone could surely not account for this. This caused me to question my initial assumption and led to further exploration of this topic. The possible fact that the lower oestrogen levels after menopause increase beta amyloid production as well as cause a decline in glucose metabolism in the brain, leading to the catabolism of its own white matter for fuel, fascinated me. This led to the development of my interest in the biochemistry of Alzheimer’s. In the process of carrying out this project I have developed my data handling, time management, critical and analytical thinking skills.”
As you can see, this paragraph highlights two super-curricular activities I did, namely reading a scientific article and conducting a Biochemistry-related Welsh Baccalaureate research project. I discuss how, after reading the article, I created my own assumption for why there might be a greater prevalence of Alzheimer’s in females and males, however, through doing more research I discovered that the actual reason for this was completely different. This demonstrates my ability to take information I read, critically think about it to create my own hypothesis on the topic, and then research it further to determine if my hypothesis is correct. This not only demonstrates my passion for the subject but also exemplifies the critical and analytical thinking skills that Oxbridge admissions tutors are looking for.
What skills should I draw upon from the super-curricular activities I do?
As mentioned above, the most important skills you can highlight throughout your personal statement are critical and analytical thinking skills.
Other skills you should be highlighting, irrespective of your course, are:
The ability to understand and use what you have learnt (the tutors don’t want to teach a student that can just regurgitate anything they are told without being able to apply it)
Independent thought
Intellectual curiosity
Written and verbal communication
The willingness to consider new ideas and insights
Humanities/Social Sciences-specific Skills:
The ability to defend your arguments
The ability to consider all sides of an argument to come to a conclusion
The ability to pick up relevant information from large volumes of text
Science-specific Skills:
Problem-solving
Data-handling
Lab-based skills
When highlighting relevant skills, your best bet is to ‘Show, Don’t Tell’. What I mean by this is that, rather than listing out all of the skills that you may or may not have, try to demonstrate them in your personal statement. For example, something as simple as discussing that you went to a museum, came across a fascinating artefact and then went home to read more about it is indicative of intellectual curiosity. This is significantly more impactful than you saying ‘I am very intellectually curious’ without providing any evidence that this is true.
If you end up feeling like listing specific skills would be useful to your application, make sure to provide an exact example of how you developed these skills, as I did in the personal statement extract above: ‘In the process of carrying out this project I have developed my data handling, time management, critical and analytical thinking skills.’
When should I start engaging in these super-curricular activities?
Before applying to Oxford, I was often told that I didn’t need to start doing any concrete preparation for my application until the summer before I applied. Say I started in July after my first year of A-level exams, this would have left me with only three and a half months to pack in all the super-curricular activities I wanted to partake in before writing my personal statement.
In actual fact, the best time to start those super-curricular activities is NOW! By starting in advance, you give yourself time to properly delve into each activity and begin thinking critically and analytically about them. This is key to ensuring you stand out and it hugely increases your chances of receiving an offer from a top UK university.
Overall, start thinking about topics you find interesting in your school lessons and research those further. From there, you can build on your knowledge with other activities until that notebook/document is full of content that is ready to be compiled into your outstanding personal statement!
