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Reading: Question 3: Preparation outside education

Part of the 4,000-character total; minimum 350 characters. Aim for roughly 800-1,200 characters here.

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

This covers everything beyond the classroom: super-curricular reading and projects, work experience, volunteering, competitions, relevant hobbies. The key word is useful. Reading wants you to connect each activity to a skill or insight the course rewards, not just to list what you have done.

Why they ask it

This is where many applicants leak character count on unrelated achievements. Used well, it shows initiative and real-world contact with the field. Used badly, it becomes a hobby dump. The 'why are these experiences useful' clause is the tutor telling you exactly how to write it.

Three ways in
Lead with your strongest super-curricular

Open with your best academic enrichment (a relevant book, lecture series, MOOC, or self-driven project) and what it changed in your thinking.

Make work experience earn its place

For any work experience or volunteering, say what it taught you that the degree will use, not just that you did it.

Tie any hobby to a skill

If you include a non-academic activity, link it explicitly to a transferable skill such as discipline, leadership, or communication.

✕  Weak opening

“Outside of school I enjoy playing football, reading, and spending time with friends and family.”

✓  Strong opening

“A summer volunteering in a hospital pharmacy taught me that the hardest part of healthcare is often communication, not chemistry, which is why I read Atul Gawande's work on systems and error straight afterwards.”

✦ Annotated example · Preparation beyond the classroom. Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →
Outside school, I run a small weather station from my bedroom roof and publish its readings to the Weather Underground network, where amateur stations help fill gaps between official sites. 1Maintaining it has taught me things no textbook did: that a poorly sited rain gauge reads low, that sensors drift, and that real data arrives messy and needs cleaning before it means anything. 2I completed the University of Reading's free online course on monsoons and the Royal Meteorological Society's student weather briefings, which introduced me to ensemble forecasting and why a single prediction is less honest than a range of them. 3Volunteering at a local flood-resilience group, I helped residents read river-gauge data before storms, and I saw how a forecast only matters once someone can act on it. 4I also keep a reading habit, working through Storm in a Teacup and the RMet journal Weather, which keep stretching my vocabulary faster than I can spend it. 5These experiences are useful because they have already given me the working rhythm of the field: observe carefully, distrust clean-looking data, and communicate uncertainty plainly. I arrive not just wanting to study meteorology, but having practised it.6
  1. 1Leads with concrete, ongoing super-curricular activity rather than a vague hobby, immediately answering the prompt with evidence Reading rewards.
  2. 2Turns the activity into transferable learning about data quality, showing the candidate grasps the practical realities of working scientists.
  3. 3Names specific, credible super-curricular sources (including Reading's own MOOC), demonstrating researched, discipline-aware preparation.
  4. 4Adds a service dimension that connects the science to real human stakes, broadening the candidate beyond pure technical interest.
  5. 5Shows sustained intellectual curiosity through wider reading, a low-cost but credible signal of genuine subject obsession.
  6. 6Closes by explicitly stating why the experiences matter (the prompt's exact ask) and frames them as genuine preparation, reinforcing readiness.
Stuck? Start here
  • What is the single most relevant thing you have done outside class, and what did it actually teach you about the subject or about yourself as a future student?
  • For each activity you want to include, can you finish the sentence 'this is useful because the degree will require...'?
  • Did any outside experience lead you back to reading or research? Can you show that loop?
Before you submit
  • Does every activity connect to a skill or insight the course rewards?
  • Have you cut or tied down any purely social hobbies?
  • Is your strongest, most subject-relevant item first?

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