Writing the PERFECT Classics Personal Statement
PART 1: GROUND RULES
There is no shortage of advice on how to write a good Oxbridge personal statement. But there’s also no shortage of difficulty in knowing what to believe, what to prioritise, and how to apply a series of abstract Dos and Don’ts in practice.
This doesn’t claim to be a definitive guide to the Classics personal statement, but it does aim at being a practical one. In the first part, I talk you through the function of the personal statement and the key rules for writing a good one. In the second part, I have a go at writing a “perfect” personal statement and explain why I think each paragraph is effective.
What is the personal statement for?
As far as an Oxbridge application is concerned, a personal statement essentially has three functions:
FUNCTION 1: Allows you to show that you are genuinely interested in the subject for which you’re applying;
FUNCTION 2: Gives you a chance to show that you have interesting, original thoughts, and hence would be a worthwhile student to teach;
FUNCTION 3: Provides possible talking points at interview.
Less obvious is a further question: what is a personal statement capable of achieving? This is an important question because the limits of this exercise need to be recognised from the outset. Even the very best personal statement won’t get any candidate in to Oxford or Cambridge on its own. It’s one piece of a large mosaic of data that admissions tutors use as the basis of their decision and its relevance becomes greatly diminished post-interview.
It’s also far more important for other universities than it is for Oxbridge. This is because in all bar a few Cambridge colleges, your Oxbridge admissions tutors will have read two longer examples of your written work that give them a much more detailed picture of your academic potential. And of course, almost all candidates are offered an interview, which is given more weight in the application process and supersedes the first impression given by the personal statement.
That said, it’s important to write a good personal statement for two reasons. A personal statement creates a first impression: a good one won’t get you that far, but a bad one will make things more difficult. Secondly, a good personal statement might give you some degree of control over how your admissions process goes. Interesting things you say in your personal statement are likely to come up at interview. If you can talk impressively at interview about something you mentioned in your personal statement, then the statement has worked for you: it’s steered the interview discussion into friendly territory. (This also makes the personal statement dangerous: it’s possible to mention something in your personal statement that you’re not prepared to talk about in more detail, then stumble when you’re asked about it at interview).
We’re now in a position to lay down a few important rules for perfecting the personal statement.
Personal statement: key principles:
1) SHOW OFF IN YOUR CONTENT, NOT YOUR STYLE
One of the key problems I faced when I drafted my personal statement for the first time was: what style should I write in? At the time, all of my instincts were wrong: GCSE (and, to some extent, A-level), rewards bad writing. Students are encouraged to show off complicated vocabulary and burden their prose with bucketloads of rhetorical techniques. As a result, many sixth formers tip over from sophistication into pretention.
There is no single writing style favoured by Classicists. Some embrace 20th-century theory and pepper their discussions with theoretical buzzwords. Some write sentences that go on for a page or more. Some are as simple and concise in their style as anyone could wish. But when they are writing about Classics (as you’re doing in your personal statement), a straightforward, non-pretentious style is clearly favoured. Take the following book review: http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2019/2019-03-02.html. It is lively enough, but is eminently readable and has very few rhetorical flourishes.
The lesson to take from this is: don’t use your writing style to show off! There are a (very small) number of Classicists who pull off a denser, more florid style. It is extremely hard to do, takes a decade (at least) to learn and annoys any number of their colleagues. Don’t risk it! Use the draft statement below as an example of the kind of style you should be aiming for.
(PS: Don’t start successive sentences with the word “I” – it sounds clunky.)
2) SHOW, DON’T TELL
You’ll already have had the message that personal statements are about showing off subject interest drummed into you. But this led me to despair when I was drafting my statement. I knew I was interested in Classics, but how was I supposed to convey this in a few characters?
The answer is actually fairly simple. Tutors know that a student who not only reads extra books and does extra-curricular things but also has interesting thoughts about them is by definition an interested student. They’re not convinced by someone who claims to be interested or someone who says, “I went to see this play, which shows that I’m interested.”
The three rules below should give you a more detailed view of what this is about.
Don’t say, “My interest in Classics was captured on a trip to Greece when …”. Admissions tutors aren’t interested in whether you were interested in Greek myths as a child (that’s not really what Classics is about, anyway). The sorts of things that first capture your interest in a subject aren’t the things that are going to make it interesting at undergraduate level and beyond.
Don’t use emotive language. If you catch yourself on thesaurus.com looking for synonyms for “passionate” or “enjoy”, stop yourself. This is a sign that you’re trying to tell the admissions tutor that you’re interested.
Don’t assume that listing extra-curricular Classics-related things that you’ve done or read will convince the tutor that you’re interested. The fact that you went to the Bryanston summer school or a school trip to the Verulamium Museum in St Albans or the Cambridge Greek Play (or whatever) isn’t inherently impressive. You can only show interest by explaining what you found interesting about that experience.
3) TELL A STORY
Lots of students attempt to manufacture an impression of interest by putting together (or being given) a reading list (often plundered from the first-year undergraduate curriculum) of canonical works and saying a couple of things about each of the things they read. This is just about alright as a strategy, especially if you have interesting things to say about each text, but certainly isn’t optimal. It risks giving the impression that you’re reading things so that you can talk about them in your personal statement – and if that’s what you’re doing, it’s probably obvious to your admissions tutor.
The ideal applicant (who doesn’t exist, but is something to aspire to) is curious, but also reads with purpose. They pluck a few texts off the shelf at random to see what they contain, but interesting things they read in text A will lead them to text B, and so on.
To look like the ideal student, you need to find links between the things that you’ve read. You could say that text A gave you impression X, which led you to read text B to see if it confirmed or rebutted this impression. Alternatively, you might say that you formed impression X after reading text A, but you changed your mind after reading text B (and explain why). This is particularly effective because it shows that you read critically (good), form views (better still), but also that you’re prepared to change your views in response to new evidence (excellent). Most importantly of all, it shows that your interest has developed organically and that you haven’t just followed a “get into Oxbridge” game plan.
4) COMBINE BREADTH AND DEPTH
The three main limbs of the Oxbridge Classics courses are literature, history and philosophy. Most people are more interested in some of these than others, and will go on to specialise to some extent as the degree progresses. This is entirely fine, and indeed encouraged. What you want to show at this stage is that you’re interested in Classics as a whole, but that you’re capable of developing (and have already started to develop) specific areas of interest. That being so, how should you go about marrying breadth and depth?
I’m going to suggest two strategies. Each paragraph of your personal statement will be based on a key text or idea. Mine had four main paragraphs, each focusing on a different aspect of my interest, and that seems about right. As a rule of thumb, I’d suggest that at least two of those four should focus primarily on a single discipline (this can include combination of disciplines, e.g. a discussion of Plato’s Phaedo that talks about the literary and philosophical elements), and at least one should focus primarily on another (e.g. two that are mostly about literature, one that’s about a mixture of literature and history and one that’s just about philosophy). And it’s a good idea to have some literature in there somewhere.
You’ll notice that I haven’t said anything about striking a balance between Greek things and Roman things. This is because I don’t think it matters. The important difference is between the disciplines, not between Greece and Rome.
5) ADOPT A SENSIBLE STRUCTURE
The personal statement doesn’t give you many words to play with and it demands serious clarity of thought and structure. I’d suggest four to five main paragraphs that tell the story of your interest, each focusing on a main text or idea and what reflections you’ve had about it. A sensible mini-structure for each paragraph might be:
How your interest led you to read text X / consider idea Y
What aspect you found most interesting and why
How this changed/affirmed your opinion on a certain issue, or how it surprised you
Although this structure might seem fairly mechanical, you can make each paragraph feel fresh by making your content interesting and varying your sentence structure.
6) COMMENT ON A RANGE OF TEXTS AND EXPERIENCES
It would be easy to shape each paragraph around a single text that you’ve read (e.g. Paragraph 1: Iliad; Paragraph 2: Aeneid; Paragraph 3: Aeschylus’ Agamemnon; Paragraph 4: Herodotus’ Histories). This is fine, and could be the basis of a strong personal statement … but it’s not very interesting.
There are a few ways of improving on a structure like this. One is to introduce comparisons. So rather than discussing the Iliad and the Aeneid separately, introduce some kind of comparison. Perhaps you were struck by the lack of a principal “hero” in the Iliad (this is especially striking when compared to the Odyssey, which has Odysseus front and centre). What can this tell us about the society that produced the Iliad? Maybe that war isn’t just about a winner-takes-all glory contest (though there are plenty of those throughout), but rather a complex system of exchanges of honour, where the individual is only important to the extent that he participates in a broader network of social relations that recognises his importance. Does the comparative prominence of Aeneas in the Aeneid reflect the comparatively individual-focused form of politics in Augustan Rome, with Augustus as the figurehead of the new Empire? Or maybe the fact that Aeneas says so little, has so little presence as a character, suggests that the notion of a central “hero” rings hollow…
The ideas sketched out in the previous paragraph are embryonic, but that’s fine – you’re not looking to produce a mini-essay, but to show how reading these texts has prompted deep and interesting reflections about the ancient world.
Another method is to incorporate discussion of modern responses to ancient literature. Perhaps you’ve seen a modern version of Euripides’ Medea at the theatre; perhaps you’ve read an essay in ER Dodds’ The Greeks and the Irrational or Mary Beard’s Confronting the Classics or Nietzche’s The Birth of Tragedy (or whatever) that changed your perspective on the ancient world, or on a specific ancient text; or perhaps you disagreed with the argument. These show that you have a range of interests and that you’re capable of making intelligent links between ancient texts and modern responses, which is a key skill in any classics degree.
Finally, it’s worth referring to something that’s not quite as obvious as the Iliad, Herodotus or Euripides’ Medea. This doesn’t mean you should reach for the most obscure thing you can find, but if you’ve been reading some Greek tragedy, maybe pick up a comedy by Aristophanes and see what you think of that; if you’ve been reading epic, have a go at some shorter poems by Horace or Ovid or Catullus to get a sense of a very different art form. This shows that you’re able to develop your interest a little further than most, and that you appreciate that Classics is about more than the handful of authors you encounter in school.
PART 2: DEMONSTRATION
Now that we’ve established how to write a strong personal statement in theory, it’s time to have a go at putting this theory into practice. My go at the “perfect” Classics personal statement is written below, followed by a commentary explaining why I think it works.
My attempt at a personal statement
“Although my interest in Classics began with the crossword-puzzle challenge of Latin language, my experience of reading classical literature has confirmed that I would find undergraduate study more rewarding still. Studying extracts of the Iliad at AS-Level, I enjoyed the visual detail and evocative similes of Homeric battle scenes, but my perception of the text was radically changed by reading the epic in its entirety. I was particularly struck by the depiction of women. Although women are frequently passive – prizes and objects – I was interested in the way the text gestures towards alternative worlds in which the relationship between men and women is different. In the world of gods, Hera overpowers her husband through deception. In that of the shield, the relationship between men and women is apparently non-hierarchical and co-operative. Most strikingly, the female laments that conclude the epic present an alternative view of the world of the poem itself. By offering these alternative perspectives, perhaps the poet invites us to question the gender hierarchy that he himself has constructed.
These reflections sparked my interest in the depiction of women in classical literature more generally. Comparing Euripides’ Medea with Simon Stone’s reproduction, which I watched at the Barbican earlier this year, I came to appreciate the difficulty of reflecting ancient concepts of womanhood in modern terms. For instance, I found Stone’s depiction of Medea as a pharmacologist ingenious if incomplete. Just as the modern marginalisation of women in science makes Stone’s protagonist someone “other”, whose cleverness is the object of suspicion, the same could be said of Medea, who does not obviously have “magic” powers in Euripides’ play either but is despised for her cleverness and foreignness. Yet what Stone’s protagonist arguably lacks is an ambiguity that runs through the original – is Medea just another human driven to extraordinary lengths by circumstance, or is she something entirely alien: foreigner, witch, even goddess? This led me to reflect on the difference in cultural vocabulary between Euripides’ audience and Stone’s: for the Athenian audience, “human” was arguably a less stable concept than it is now, allowing playwrights to question what it means to say a character is human.
I have found the stagecraft of ancient drama as interesting as its characters. In reading Aristophanic comedy as a counterpoint to the tragedies I have read, I especially enjoyed the ways in which stage space is manipulated to create powerful political images. In Lysistrata, for instance, I found it interesting to reflecting on images such as the marching, quasi-military demi-choruses of men and women advancing on each other. Using the image of armed struggle between city-states to depict a political struggle within a city-state that is also a domestic struggle between men and women suggests a jumble of interrelated conflicts, highlighting the sense of a city turned upside-down. The power of such images has become even more apparent to me after studying the depiction of comic scenes on pottery: in studying a culture where images were easier to reproduce than text, perhaps greater emphasis on the stagecraft of ancient drama is due.
My growing awareness of the power of image and metaphor in Athenian culture made reading Plato’s Meno all the more interesting. The practical demonstration Socrates conducts with Meno’s slave is compelling for its visual directness; but I wondered whether Plato might be encouraging us to question the image even as he employs it to devastating effect. Perhaps the impressiveness of this visual demonstration blinds us to the fact that the distinction between “questioning” (what Socrates purports to have done) and “teaching” (what he purports not to have done) may be less stark than Socrates is prepared to admit; and hence the conclusion that we have innate ideas is unsafe.” (3,938 characters)
Commentary
Paragraph 1
I don’t dwell on how I became interested in Classics but show that I recognise that more advanced elements of the subject are more interesting. Next, I show (without telling) that I can enjoy close reading of texts, but that my interest doesn’t stop there. I pick out one aspect of the Iliad that I know I’d feel confident talking about at interview (women), gesture to the obvious point (that women in Homer are marginalised) but then focus primarily on the more interesting point: that he also offers alternative perspectives on the role of women. I reach a tentative conclusion (this shows where my thinking’s got to so far while showing that I’m still prepared to change my mind).
Paragraph 2
This starts with the all-important link, showing how my interest in one thing has led me to others. The comparison of a modern re-telling of Medea with the original shows that I can do trendy analysis of modern retellings of ancient stories, but that I’m not afraid to engage with original texts in detail. I’ve focused again on what thoughts I’ve taken away: I’m showing, not telling, that I’m interested in these plays. At the same time, I’m showing off the all-important skill of comparison, which Classicists deploy all the time. At the end of the paragraph, I zoom out to suggest a big-picture conclusion about the difference between the ancient and the modern world. It’s a hugely debatable conclusion but it’s couched in suitably tentative language, and there’s no shame in thinking big as tutors are looking for ambitious candidates.
Paragraph 3
Another link, but one that allows me to show off my interest in a related field. Note the phrase “as a counterpoint to the tragedies I have read” – it shows that I’m interested in experiencing different types of ancient literature, but that my interest is also developing organically: the Iliad leads me to tragedy, which leads me to comedy. I then focus in on something very specific. This is fine, because it shows that I can do close analysis and I expand out into a more general reflection on the role of images in Athenian culture afterwards.
Paragraph 4
It’s now time to show that I can do something other than literature (though in a sense I’ve been “doing” cultural history all the way through), so I find a link and chat about some philosophy. Again, I pick an example, because I don’t have many words and it’s easier to talk sensibly about something specific than something general when you’ve got very little space to play with. As in paragraph 1, I acknowledge the obvious point (the visual demonstration provides a vivid illustration that makes Socrates’ key point – we have innate knowledge – more vivid) but then I swiftly move on to a more advanced reflection. The aim is to show that I’m able to think outside the box without being contrary for the sake of it. Note the cautionary “perhaps”: I’m showing that I read critically and don’t take texts at face value, but that I don’t allow that critical instinct to become a dogma of its own.
Structure
As suggested in Part 1, this is in four paragraphs, each of which has a primary focus (1. Iliad, 2. Medea, 3. Lysistrata, 4. Meno). Each is linked to the next or previous, and although each has a primary focus, using comparison and discussion of modern responses to make it livelier and more interesting.
Coverage
I focus exclusively on Greek texts – that’s fine. But there’s a mix of literature, history and philosophy in my analysis and a mix of completely obvious texts (Iliad etc.) and less obvious ones (like Lysistrata).
Tone
I try to adopt a fairly neutral tone, but allow myself some lively touches, like the short, punchy sentences in Paragraph 1: “In the world of gods, Hera overpowers her husband through deception. In that of the shield, the relationship between men and women is apparently non-hierarchical and co-operative.” It’s never colloquial, but neither is it unswervingly formal throughout: the parentheses in the final paragraph “(what Socrates purports [etc])” are at the looser end. This is designed to show that I’m comfortable in my own skin as a writer. The style is still slightly rough around the edges but I resisted the temptation to edit it further: once you’ve got to this stage, you’re probably better off going away and reading more than you are knocking out another draft of the personal statement.
This article was written by Tom (Oxford & Cambridge - Classics).
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Author: Tom - Oxford
BA/MPhil Classics
I’ve been lucky enough to study Classics at both Oxford and Cambridge. This means I’ve had experience of the admissions systems at both universities, as well as of the important differences in teaching and course structure.
