Strathclyde: Q3: Outside formal education

Part of the shared 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

This covers everything beyond your classes: wider reading, online courses, work experience, competitions, volunteering, projects. The phrase that matters most is why are these experiences useful. Strathclyde wants the relevance, not the resume.

Why they ask it

This is where super-curricular evidence lives, the reading and doing that prove your interest extends past what was required of you. Tutors use it to separate applicants who are merely capable from those who are genuinely engaged. The reflection on why each thing matters is what earns the marks.

Three ways in

Go deep on one thing

Lead with one substantial activity, a book, a project, a placement, and dissect it rather than listing many things shallowly.

State the why for each item

For everything you include, explicitly state the transferable skill or insight it gave you and tie it back to the course.

Justify anything unrelated

If you include an activity outside the subject, justify it through a concrete skill, never as filler.

✕ Weak opening

“In my spare time I enjoy playing the guitar, captaining the netball team, and reading a wide range of books.”

✓ Strong opening

“A two-week placement at a community pharmacy taught me that the hardest part of the job was not the chemistry but explaining it to worried patients.”

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

The most useful engineering I have done was not assessed by anyone. ¹For two years I have rebuilt bicycles for a community repair shop, and stripping a seized bottom bracket or truing a buckled wheel taught me tolerances in a way no diagram could, because a wheel either spins clean or it rubs and there is no partial credit. ²I kept a notebook of every repair, and over time I started spotting which failures clustered, so I could predict a worn freehub from the sound it made before I even opened it. ³Alongside that, I worked through MIT OpenCourseWare lectures on statics in the evenings, pausing constantly to check I could redraw each force diagram myself, and reading Henry Petroski's To Engineer Is Human, which convinced me that studying failure is as important as designing success. ⁴These experiences are useful because they connect the two halves of the degree before I arrive: the workshop taught me what real materials do when you push them, and the reading taught me the vocabulary to describe why. ⁵I am coming to Strathclyde already in the habit of taking things apart, asking why they broke, and writing the answer down.

1A short, confident opener that immediately signals super-curricular evidence, which Strathclyde rates above ordinary extracurriculars.
2Hands-on, sustained activity with a vivid technical detail (tolerances, truing a wheel). The 'no partial credit' line shows the applicant has internalised engineering's unforgiving feedback.
3Demonstrates the applicant turning experience into data and pattern-recognition, the beginnings of an engineering mindset rather than just a hobby.
4Names specific super-curricular sources (a named course and a named book) and shows active, critical engagement rather than passive consumption. This is precisely the evidence Strathclyde looks for.
5Explicitly answers the 'why are these useful' half of the prompt, linking practical and theoretical preparation to the course itself.

Stuck? Start here

What is the single most substantial thing I have done outside class related to this subject, and what did it actually teach me?
For each activity I want to include, can I finish the sentence this was useful because?
Have I read anything beyond my syllabus that genuinely shaped how I think about the field?

Before you submit

Have I led with depth on one activity rather than a shallow list?
Does every item state why it is useful and link back to the course?
Have I cut any hobby that I cannot connect to a relevant skill or insight?

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