Personal statement query, two linked but different courses

[GrealishHairband]

DD is doing her PS currently ready for the school deadline of the end of the month. Yes she should have pulled her finger out earlier but she’s only really just settled on the courses/uni’s she is interested in.

She has her sights set on one of two courses, they’re linked, as in they’d come under the same department but are obviously different specialties within that department.

How does she keep her personal statement generic enough while evidencing that she is really interested in the subject. There are some crossovers within the two degrees and I suspect it’s possible there will be overlap of lectures for those uni’s that offer both courses.

I’m a midwife and have worked with uni’s assessing candidates etc previously and know that if an application is received that is not specifically midwifery focused it won’t get past first shift - if candidates have hedged their bets and applied for nursing as well as midwifery for instance. But is that because it’s a super tough competitive course and they can afford to do such a hard sift. Is it so dimly viewed in other departments?

Does anyone have any advice?

I applied for medicine, with a history of medicine course as my back up. My personal statement briefly mentioned a love of reading and history but was completely geared to medicine. I got the history of medicine place.
Focus on being interested in the overlapping areas. Eg if both are essay based subjects - a love of writing and creativity etc.

It does depend on how competitive the courses are and whether they are both at the same uni. My DS is doing this but only applying for one course at each uni and they are not the most highly ranked courses or unis.

Advice we were given is go through the course specs and highlight key words, then look for commonalities and use those word in the PS. In DS's case he is looking at the same job sector but via different paths so he has mentioned that in the intro and conclusion. It is also worth checking with Admissions departments, two have advised us to drop them a separate email when the form goes in to explain what he is doing and why, my DS does have specific reasons which are reasonable.

We were also told that it's not unusual if a subject is fairly rare and eg only two unis in the geographic area they are willing to consider moving to run the course.

DD has just done this at one university last year.
Both courses were in the same faculty and there was some overlap.
She wrote her personal statement with enough of a slant to cover both courses and she received offers for both.

I think you're right about highly competitive courses though. There has to be a way of narrowing down thousands of applicants so anyone with an inkling of this course not being their no. 1 aim won't get any further.

Midwifery/nursing definitely doesn't like this mixed personal statement as you know OP but it is quite usual in a lot of other subjects especially if there is some overlap

Thank you all, we’ve had a long chat tonight and she’s decided to focus on one particular course as was finding it just too hard to cover both in the PS. She plans to use one of her choices as a wild card in the other subject as that’s her less preferred option and she has a space left once she’s put in her uni’s of choice for course one.

God this is tough!

Op I see you've decided, but just to add, dd applied for courses in Eng lit and classical civ at two RG unis with a PS that spoke about a passion for literature that was born from an interest in classical mythology (this is actually true). It read very well and hung together tho it was tight on the word count as she had to talk about two courses IYSWIM.

She got offers from all four courses, and in the end went for Eng lit but it could have been either.