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Cardiff  /  Essays  /  Prompt 3

Cardiff: What else you have done

Part of the 4,000-character shared total; 350-character minimum

What else have you done to prepare outside of formal education, and why are these experiences useful?
What it’s really asking

Cardiff wants your super-curricular and relevant wider experience: reading, projects, work experience, competitions, or shadowing, plus a clear reason each one matters for the course.

Why they ask it

This is where you prove commitment beyond the classroom. The 'why are these experiences useful' clause is doing real work: Cardiff does not want a list, it wants reflection tying each experience to the subject or profession. For Medicine, Dentistry and similar, relevant work experience is close to essential.

Three ways in
Go deep, not wide

Choose one or two genuinely course-relevant experiences and develop them rather than listing many.

Say why it mattered

For each, state plainly what it taught you or made you reconsider about the field.

Be realistic about the career

For professional courses, show honest insight into the profession, not an idealised version.

✕  Weak opening

“In my spare time I enjoy reading widely, playing the piano, and volunteering, which have all made me a well-rounded person.”

✓  Strong opening

“Two weeks shadowing in a care home taught me that most of dentistry is patient trust, not technique: I watched a nervous resident refuse treatment until the dentist simply sat and explained, slowly, what would happen.”

✦ Annotated example · Geography: beyond the classroom. Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →
Outside formal study, I volunteer with a local river restoration group, spending Saturday mornings clearing invasive Himalayan balsam from the banks of the Ely. 1It sounds like simple weeding, but it taught me how an introduced species can outcompete natives and destabilise a bank until it collapses in winter floods, geography happening at the scale of a single root system. 2I also taught myself the basics of QGIS over a summer, mapping the group's clearance sites so we could see which stretches recovered and which did not. 3The map revealed something none of us had noticed on the ground: recovery clustered upstream of the road bridge, which made me wonder whether the bridge was altering flow and sediment in ways our manual surveys missed. 4These experiences are useful because they have taught me that fieldwork is slow, often inconclusive, and far more rewarding than any textbook diagram, and that is exactly the kind of patient, evidence-led work I want a Cardiff geography degree to build on.5
  1. 1Opens with sustained, subject-relevant activity rather than a one-off, signalling commitment that maps directly onto the degree.
  2. 2Reflects on what the activity taught, connecting hands-on work to course concepts. Cardiff explicitly rewards reflection, not just the listing of an experience.
  3. 3Shows independent, self-directed skill building in a tool used in the actual degree, strong super-curricular evidence of initiative.
  4. 4Turns the activity into a genuine research insight, demonstrating the analytical curiosity geography departments look for.
  5. 5Closes by stating plainly why the experiences matter and linking them to the course, satisfying the prompt's 'why are these experiences useful' directly.
Stuck? Start here
  • Which experience outside school genuinely changed how you see this subject or profession?
  • For each thing you want to mention, can you say in one sentence why it matters for the course?
  • Are you going deep on one or two items, or thinly listing five?
Before you submit
  • Focuses on a few relevant experiences with real depth.
  • Explains why each is useful for the course, not just that you did it.
  • For professional courses, shows realistic insight and any required work experience.

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