St Andrews: What you did outside formal education

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

What else have you done to prepare outside of formal education, and why are these experiences useful?

What it’s really asking

St Andrews wants super-curricular evidence: wider reading, online courses, competitions, work, projects, or activities, but only insofar as they prepared you for this subject. The emphasis is on usefulness to the course.

Why they ask it

This separates applicants who only did the homework from those who chase the subject on their own time. It is also where weak statements drown in irrelevant hobbies, so a disciplined, subject-linked answer stands out.

Three ways in

Go one level deeper

Take one self-directed project or reading and show what it taught you that the syllabus did not.

Reframe a job

Describe work, volunteering, or a competition only through the lens of a skill the degree uses.

Show you chased it

Highlight something you sought out, built, or pursued without being told to.

✕ Weak opening

“Outside of school I enjoy playing the violin, captaining the netball team, and volunteering at a care home.”

✓ Strong opening

“After my chemistry class ended at acids and bases, I taught myself the basics of crystallography from an open MIT course to understand why a molecule's shape decides what it does.”

✦ Annotated example · Beyond formal education. Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →

For eighteen months I have translated for a Ukrainian family resettled three streets from mine, sitting in on appointments my school timetable never prepared me for. ¹In a housing office I watched abstractions I had only read about, statelessness, the burden of proof, the discretion of a single caseworker, decide where a nine-year-old would sleep. ²It taught me that policy is not a document; it is a queue, a form, and a person with the power to say no. ³Outside that, I run a small fortnightly discussion group where six of us pick one news story and try to argue it from the side we find hardest to hold. ⁴Defending a position I despise has done more for my thinking than any debate trophy could, because it forces me to find the strongest version of what I oppose. ⁵I also keep a folder of foreign-policy speeches I distrust, annotating where the rhetoric outruns the evidence. ⁶None of this was assigned. That is exactly why it is the part of my preparation I trust most. ⁷

1Leads with a sustained, real-world commitment that is genuinely super-curricular: it extends the subject into lived practice, not a clubs list.
2Connects fieldwork directly to IR concepts, showing the subject operating in the real world rather than just on a reading list.
3A genuine, hard-won insight (reflection). This is the kind of original observation St Andrews rewards over a recitation of activities.
4Self-directed intellectual activity, low-budget and student-run, which signals authentic obsession rather than resume-padding.
5Shows the steel-manning habit central to good IR analysis, and quietly dismisses prize-chasing in favour of genuine rigour.
6A small, private, ongoing practice. Demonstrates that the obsession runs even when no one is watching or grading.
7Closes by naming the value of unassigned, self-motivated work, directly echoing what the school rewards: super-curricular over extra-curricular.

Stuck? Start here

What did I pursue about this subject when no one was making me?
Which activity built a skill the degree actually needs?
Can I cut anything here that does not point at the course?

Before you submit

Is every item linked to the subject or a course-relevant skill?
Did I show initiative I chose, not just duties I was given?
Have I reflected on what each experience taught me?

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