Mumsnet Talk

DS2 has a question about university applications that his school doesn’t seem to be able to answer for him. He is a bit of an all rounder, but with no enthusiasm for sciences chose to do A levels in Art, Geography, English and Latin. For some strange reason he is bursting with enthusiasm about Latin and would very much like to do a Classics degree, but appreciates it may not be of much use in future employment.

He has decided that if he could study Classics at Oxford this would be his first choice, but that if he didn’t get into Oxford he would prefer to do Geography somewhere else.
I think his enthusiasm for Latin is genuine as he persuaded his teacher to set up a group for the 3 of them that wanted to do it to A level and they do much of their work after school (State Grammar).

The problem he has is that he believes you can only have one personal statement for all applications, which of course would have to be geared to the subject. He also does not know for certain that he can apply to Oxford for Classics and 4 other places for Geography. Does anyone out there know the answer?

DH is helpfully suggesting that he write about the joys of reading Ovid sat on a drumlin, but I don’t think that is going to get him into anywhere!

I'm afraid you can only apply for one course - therefore your son will either have to choose to study geography or classics. The personal statement must be written about your son's ambition to study one subject and this goes to all 5 of his university choices.

unless of course he finds a combined honours degree, then the personal statement can be about 2 subjects

He is correct you can only write one personal statement and therefore if he is set on applying to different courses he will need a statement that covers both, which will be tricky. I would suggest if he is really keen on studying Classics at Oxford he should stick to that otherwise he may be seen to be hedging his bets.

Thanks for all these speedy replies on a subject we were struggling to get an answer to. Yes, I think he was hoping that by doing things the way he wanted the choice about whether to follow head (Geog) or heart (Classics) would be determined by the offers that came in ( if any) He will have to find a plan B.

To be clear, he can apply for a mix of courses, there is nothing to stop him. The problem is that he has to supply tr same personal statement for all the courses & it won't look great! What about applying for Classics & taking a gap year to reapply for Geog if necessary?

Um he CAN apply for more than one course, but yes, only one PS.

However, he could write his PS with a slant towards interests in different cultures, countries, history and geography, whilst still giving it a classics slant (perhaps read some of the Latin authors who wrote about travel, the world in general, politics etc). If he is asked about this at his Oxford interview (they interview about 98% of applicants) he can explain his application.

I did this, wrote my PS all about one language when I'd applied for varying combinations of languages (all including the one in my PS). I explained this in my Cambridge interview when they asked why my other language wasn't mentioned, and they were fine with it, and gave me a place.

annabegins gives good advice .
Have you tried asking on TSR
www.thestudentroom.co.uk/forumdisplay.php?f=6 or
www.thestudentroom.co.uk/forumdisplay.php?f=134 ?

Seems perfectly reasonable ( not to say normal and desirable ) to have more than one direction of interests .

Only one ps allowed at the moment - is he in year12 currently and wanting to apply next year because there are proposals to change the UCAS application procedure for the year after (to start in 2014) to allow a different ps for each application, but that's not confirmed yet and probably a year too late.

It is however possible to write a separate PS and e-mail it to a university separately if it is a different course for the one the UCAS PS was written for. This works best if you've talked to them about it in advance and they've agreed to look at it.

I know that if you apply to Cambridge they ask you to fill in a supplementary form, where you can write a personal statement tailored to the Cambridge course - think they are quite aware of the difficulties of having a 'one-size fits all' statement. Maybe Oxford do something similar.