Writing a standout physics personal statement for UK university applications can feel overwhelming, especially for students who have never had to write one before. Oxford received 1,518 applications for Physics in the 2024/25 cycle and accepted only 173 students, an acceptance rate of just 12%. At Cambridge, Physics falls under the Natural Sciences umbrella and had an acceptance rate of 23% in 2024/25, with approximately 2,529 applications resulting in 569 accepted undergraduates.

With competition this intense, your personal statement needs to capture admissions tutors' attention immediately. In this comprehensive guide, we'll analyse physics personal statement examples for university UK applications, showing you exactly what separates outstanding statements from mediocre ones.

The ESAT (Engineering and Science Admissions Test) is used as the pre-interview admissions test for competitive courses like Engineering, Natural Sciences, and Veterinary Medicine at the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London. While every candidate would like to score highly in this test, you may find yourself not performing as well as you had hoped. Fortunately, a weaker ESAT score is not the end of your application, but there are steps you can take to strengthen the rest of your application and improve your chances of admission.