How can I get the best out of my Personal Statement?

I found that a good way to start writing Personal Statement was to google ‘Tomorrows Doctors’ or ‘Good Clinical Practice’. Those documents state explicitly the personal qualities that a doctor should have. Buzzwords like 'leadership', 'teamwork' and 'communication skills'. Think about those buzzwords, and then when writing about your experiences, try to tick as many boxes for the qualities that they’re looking for. This will help you vary the way you reflect on your experiences in order to get different personal traits across – rather than writing about 5 experiences all to do with teamwork skills.

A key point here is that you don’t need hundreds of hours of volunteer work/ 100 clinical placements etc to stand out. In the actual statement, you have ~400 words to sell yourself, and so, for example, I only actually had the room to talk about one of my clinical placements. So more than the volume of work experience you have, it’s what you’ve taken from your experiences.