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Presently, lithium ion batteries are the common battery component used in electronic devices. It is astonishing that such a small battery can generate enough electricity to run a laptop. Countless numbers of lithium ions are moving within a polymer matrix inside the battery every second. Chemical reactions similar to this happen around us continuously and benefit our life immensely, but unfortunately they are unseen by most people. I am fascinated by reaction mechanisms and how Chemistry works in general. It is often challenging to find the reason behind reactions, but it also gives a sense of achievement when my basic knowledge explains a piece of a larger puzzle. It is a great motivator and one of the reasons that I love Chemistry. I am particularly fascinated by organic chemistry especially esterification. I have been studying a number of books on this such as 'Chemistry' by Catherine Housecroft and Edwin Constable and 'Why Chemical Reactions Happen' by Peter Wothers and James Keeler in order to expand my knowledge and understand Chemistry more in depth. I aspire to have the chance to apply my knowledge outside laboratories. I believe expanding my knowledge will enable me to discover more about the world of Chemistry. I was always curious how Chemistry from classroom is employed and used in industry. Therefore, I applied for a two week internship at a Korean company called Daelim Chemical, which produces an essential organic compound used in the secondary cell in electric cars and a bisphenol compound, which is used as an organic photo conductor in laser printers. I performed experiments in ester synthesis and anlaysed the products by myself. It was a fantastic opportunity to learn how Chemistry is used and applied in the industry. It was deeply rewarding to be there working first hand in an industry lab. I learnt how to prepare for experiments to obtain pure products. I also had a chance to operate various pieces of analytic equipment such as a gas chromatograph and karl fischer titrator. I enjoyed sharing opinions with the manager about his philosophy in Chemistry, and its benefit to humanity. I am also studying A-level Mathematics, Further Mathematics and Economics. I believe mathematics provides the basis for all other subjects and encourages logical thinking. Also, skills involved in proving a formula can be used in Chemistry, such as finding the reaction mechanism and understanding complex equations or formulae. Moreover, maths helps me to manipulate data efficiently and utilise the results effectively, whilst understanding the limitations. I also took part in the Maths Challenge and qualified for the European Mathematical Olympiad, which I came in the top 25% in 30 countries worldwide. Economics is a subject of additional interest to me. Although it favors an essay approach, mathematical and scientific processes are employed to understand market behaviour. It enables me to understand how Chemistry is applied in industries according to the costs and the period or size of production. Economics requires a significant amount of research and it has improved my research skills greatly. Outside of academics, as a Head of House, it is important to communicate with younger students to spot any troubles and to help them. I have taken more responsibility to be a role model for boys, so they do things the right way. Last year, I set up a tuck shop in the boarding house in order to donate any profits to charity. I am currently learning to play the guitar and improving my handicap in golf. Also, I have a scuba-diving license and enjoy snorkeling. I am involved in the Fencing club at school and represent the 1st XI football team. I am very much looking forward to studying Chemistry in greater depth as I am sure this will fuel my enthusiasm for the subject. I am keenly anticipating for grasping the opportunity of university life and making positive contribution.
This is a successful statement written under the previous UCAS format. From 2026 entry, the personal statement is three separate answers. Below is a worked example — Economics — showing how a strong answer to each of the three questions reads:
Volunteering at a Saturday food bank in Croydon, I helped a single father of three who had moved into temporary accommodation after a zero-hours contract collapsed. What startled me was not the hardship but the bureaucracy — he had been waiting six weeks for Universal Credit because a payment glitch had reclassified him as self-employed. A Sutton Trust talk by Stephen Machin pushed me from that observation toward the literature on benefit take-up and conditional cash transfers — first Banerjee and Duflo's evidence from rural India and Mexico, then Anna Aizer's recent NBER work on the design of welfare-to-work programmes in the US. I want to study Economics because the question running through these readings — why some welfare systems escape the dependency trap while others reproduce it — has rigorous answers that combine empirical microeconomics, mechanism design, and political economy in a way no other discipline can.
Further Mathematics has been the single qualification that has reshaped how I read Economics. Working through the chapter on differential equations let me approach Solow's original 1956 paper rather than the textbook simplification — and seeing convergence as an asymptotic result rather than a guarantee made me sceptical of growth-theory papers that quote "China is converging to the US frontier" without specifying the underlying production-function assumptions. That scepticism became my EPQ. Building on Acemoglu and Robinson's Why Nations Fail and Elhanan Helpman's The Mystery of Economic Growth, I asked why the post-1978 Chinese growth episode fits neither the standard Solow convergence prediction nor the institutional pessimism of the extractive-institutions framework. My answer, framed around within-country variation in property-rights protection across coastal special economic zones, was the most rigorous piece of academic work I have produced. Economics A-level supplied the discipline-level vocabulary — perfect competition, Pareto efficiency, deadweight loss — but the model that has stayed with me is the prisoner's dilemma I first met in Maths Olympiad preparation, which I returned to repeatedly when reading Schelling's The Strategy of Conflict. In History A-level, the unit on the Bretton Woods system gave me the institutional context for Friedman's 1953 essay on flexible exchange rates — a connection that taught me how economic theory and political choice constantly co-evolve.
For the John Locke Institute 2025 Economics paper I argued — against my initial intuition — that personalised pricing is welfare-improving in aggregate, drawing on Pigou's first-degree price-discrimination framework, Hal Varian's 1989 paper on price discrimination, and the more recent empirical work by Dubé and Misra on ZipRecruiter's pricing experiments. Writing the essay forced me to take seriously the strongest version of the fairness objection — Sandel's argument in What Money Can't Buy that markets reshape the goods they price — and then to build a synthesis that conceded the moral worry while defending the consumer-surplus calculation. I came out of the process convinced that the welfare economics taught at undergraduate level is more subtle than the textbook indifference curves let on. Outside the essay competition, the book that has shaped me most is Katharina Pistor's The Code of Capital. Pistor's argument that property law constructs rather than merely protects economic value runs counter to the standard market-design literature I had been reading, and I have spent two terms working through her chapters on collateral, debt, and shareholder rights alongside the Acemoglu-Johnson critique she draws on. To test the framework against my own context, I built a small dataset on Hong Kong residential property using the publicly released Land Registry data and computed the share of the housing stock held by corporate (rather than personal) entities — a 32-line Python project that taught me more about institutional economics than any chapter I had read on it.
Up to 4,000 characters across the three answers, with a minimum of 350 each. See the official UCAS guidance.