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Overcoming the challenges of the future, like managing overpopulation and global warming, will require a robust knowledge of scientific principles, as well as an understanding of the sustainability, safety and practicality of implementing them. Chemical Engineering equips one perfectly for this. In July, a 5-day Headstart engineering course guided me toward Chemical Engineering, and a subsequent taster day at UCL crystallised in my mind what Chemical Engineering was about – the processes involved in transforming raw materials into finished products. I learned how chemicals like ammonia are manufactured, and I liked finding out how engineers conserve as much energy as possible in industry. That day prompted me to watch a series of lectures from Stanford University on Chemical Engineering, and I found myself hooked. I also subscribe to the New Scientist web feed, which I love to read. I particularly like the concept of designing and manufacturing pharmaceuticals – there is constant innovation in this sector, and the versatility of a chemical engineer would be ideal in developing new technologies in, for instance, drug delivery and drug synthesis. In cancer alone there are myriad possibilities to explore – Mukherjee writes in “Emperor of All Maladies” that few drugs and techniques are truly effective against cancer. Seeing patients’ devastation at being diagnosed with cancer at an NHS oncology unit showed me first-hand the terrible human cost of this disease. Yet there I also learnt about pioneering treatments for oesophageal cancer; e.g. inserting radioactive wires into malignant tumours. During the holidays I had the opportunity to see some factories in Ludhiana, India, which was an unforgettable experience. In particular, one warehouse that contained row upon row of 25m high printing presses opened my eyes to the scale of processes used in industry. On a smaller scale, I read “Vanity, Vitality, and Virility” by Emsley, which gave an appreciation of the surprising range of science in consumer goods. By highlighting the many engineering specifications incorporated into objects like lipstick and chewing gum, Emsley completely changed my assumption that such objects were straightforward to manufacture. Studying the sciences has given me a good overview of where the traditionally separate branches intersect. My understanding of mechanics in maths allowed me to delve deeper into problems in physics, like explaining the trajectory of a golf ball. Equally, to describe the structure of proteins in biology, one uses chemistry to describe how amino acids bond to each other. The various links between biology and chemistry intrigue me, and inspired me to write an Extended Project on the action of general anaesthesia. I enjoyed exploring this topic in much greater depth than my A-Level studies – the intricate synaptic processes that anaesthetics inhibit are fascinating. This year, I have enjoyed completing the Cambridge Chemistry Online Challenges, which allowed me to creatively solve unfamiliar chemistry problems. In addition, I also gain real satisfaction out of solving maths problems, and have competed in various maths tournaments for my school, as well as achieving Gold in both Intermediate and Senior Maths Challenges. Furthermore, I feel proud to have been ranked in the UK Maths Olympiad. My studies have been balanced with playing chess competitively. Having been British Chess Champion for four years and captain of the England Chess team, chess has taught me how to concentrate for hours at a time, think logically, and play as a team. As a member of the school debating team, I have learned to think on my feet and analyse arguments swiftly. I also enjoy playing squash, rugby and tennis. Chemical Engineering truly has the potential to make the world a better place. I look forward to developing my understanding of the subject and to being intellectually stretched at university.
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.