ABSTRACT
No point reading on, is there? You hate the candidate already, smug little bleeder. It’s two in the morning, the applications are lying in a drift under the desk, and you are an exhausted, underpaid, overstretched university tutor. You basically try to keep loving your subject and your students, but find it uphill work as ever more get shoe-horned into your tattered lecture theatres. You want to teach bright, focused, energetic, and if possible entertainingly quirky young people, who will bring a new generation’s intelligence to your field. You don’t want whey-faced little swots who never go outdoors, or illiterate oafs with multiple Asbos, or idle lumps who watch Big Brother Live. You know why UCAS personal statements are necessary. Yet there is something about them which makes you want to rip and stamp and fling and howl. If you have to read about one more multi-skilled head girl with 18 starred GCSEs you will sink an axe in the vice-chancellor’s door.
