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Exeter  /  Essays  /  Prompt 3

Exeter: Q3: What else you have done

~500 characters suggested (part of the 4,000 total; min ~350)

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

Exeter wants relevant experience from outside your formal studies (work, volunteering, competitions, independent projects, online courses) and, critically, why each one matters for this subject.

Why they ask it

This is the shortest answer for a reason: it is the supporting act. The 'why these are useful' clause is the real test, because it forces you to justify each item rather than just list it.

Three ways in
Tie it to the subject

Choose one or two activities you can connect directly to the course, and cut anything you cannot justify.

Spend words on the lesson

State each experience in a phrase, then use the rest of the sentence on what it taught you that the course will use.

Handle unrelated work briefly

If a job or activity is off-topic, name the transferable skill (reliability, communication) in a clause and move on.

✕  Weak opening

“Outside of school I play tennis, volunteer at a local shelter, and have a part-time job, all of which have made me more disciplined.”

✓  Strong opening

“Running a small reselling account taught me more about supply and pricing than any class: I set prices, watched demand swing, and learned fast when I had misread the market.”

✦ Annotated example · Volunteering, modelling, and a podcast diet. Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →
Volunteering at a food bank, I started logging how donations rose and fell each week.1 The pattern, spikes after paydays, troughs before them, was a demand curve drawn in tins.2 I built a small spreadsheet to predict shortfalls so the coordinator could order ahead.3 I also listen to More or Less obsessively, which trained me to ask what a statistic is hiding before I repeat it.4 These experiences are useful because they taught me to treat the world as data I am responsible for interpreting honestly.5 That habit of testing before trusting is the one I most want a degree to sharpen.6
  1. 1Opens with an out-of-classroom activity and immediately frames it analytically. Within a 500-character limit this earns its space by showing economic thinking, not just service.
  2. 2Names the pattern in vivid, subject-specific terms so the activity reads as economic observation rather than routine volunteering.
  3. 3Shows self-built initiative with a practical purpose, the super-curricular application Exeter prizes over passive participation.
  4. 4Names a specific resource and states the concrete skill it built, reinforcing critical engagement rather than padding a list.
  5. 5Answers the why directly, generalising the lesson rather than just describing what happened.
  6. 6Closes by linking the experiences back to the course. Roughly 500 characters, tight and complete, with no wasted words.
Stuck? Start here
  • Which out-of-school activity can you connect most directly to this subject, and how?
  • For each activity you list, can you finish the sentence 'this is useful for the course because...'?
  • If a job or hobby is unrelated, what is the single transferable skill worth one clause?
Before you submit
  • Every activity is followed by why it is useful for the subject.
  • Unrelated experience is handled in a clause, not a paragraph.
  • The answer stays well under its share of the 4,000 characters.

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