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UCL  /  Essays  /  Prompt 3

UCL: Q3: Preparation beyond formal education

Part of the 4,000-character total; minimum 350 characters. UCAS suggests around 100 to 150 words.

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

What you have done beyond school to engage with the subject: wider reading, lectures, podcasts, projects, competitions, work experience, online courses. Crucially, why each one was useful, meaning what it taught you about the field or about yourself as a future student.

Why they ask it

This section separates students who like a subject from students who actively pursue it. UK tutors call this super-curricular evidence, and it is often the deciding factor between two applicants with identical grades.

Three ways in
Go deep on one thing

Choose one substantial activity (a project, a competition, a sustained reading thread) and explain what it changed in your thinking.

Show initiative

Highlight something you sought out yourself, not an activity your school organised for you.

Tie work to academic skill

Connect a job or volunteering experience to a specific academic skill the course needs, not just to soft skills.

✕  Weak opening

“In my spare time I enjoy reading widely about economics and keeping up with the news, which has broadened my horizons.”

✓  Strong opening

“I spent a summer building a spreadsheet model of my town's bus network to test whether a fare cut could pay for itself through higher ridership.”

✦ Annotated example · Economics, beyond the classroom. Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →
Outside lessons, I taught myself the basics of Python to scrape five years of local house-price listings, because I wanted to test whether a new tram line had really lifted prices nearby. 1My analysis was crude and probably confounded by a dozen factors I could not isolate, but doing it taught me how hard causal claims are to earn. 2I also read widely past the syllabus, working through Tim Harford and then Daron Acemoglu, marking the pages where their conclusions disagreed so I could decide for myself. 3Each week I volunteer at a community debt-advice drop-in, where economics stops being abstract and becomes a family deciding which bill to leave unpaid. 4Listening to those conversations made me want to understand the incentives in consumer credit that put people there in the first place. 5These experiences are useful because they taught me what models leave out, and that good economics has to keep one eye on the people inside the data.6
  1. 1Leads with self-directed, technical initiative tied to a genuine economic question. UCL rewards independent preparation, and scraping real data shows obsession acted on, not stated.
  2. 2Honest reflection on limitations signals critical, mature thinking, which matters more to UCL than a polished result.
  3. 3Shows super-curricular reading with a critical posture, comparing authors rather than just listing them, which signals independent judgement.
  4. 4Adds a human, ethical dimension and connects the subject to real consequences, broadening the picture beyond pure quantitative interest.
  5. 5Links the volunteering directly back to an economic curiosity, showing the experiences feed one another rather than sitting as separate boxes ticked.
  6. 6Explicitly answers the why are these useful part of the prompt and ties the activities to a single insight, keeping the section close to the 100 to 150 word UCAS guidance.
Stuck? Start here
  • What is the single most ambitious thing you have done with this subject on your own, with no teacher telling you to?
  • Of everything you have read or watched about the field, which one item actually changed how you think, and how?
  • If you have a job or volunteer role, what intellectual skill did it sharpen that the course will use?
Before you submit
  • Features at least one self-initiated, substantial activity rather than a list
  • Explains why each experience was useful to your readiness for the degree
  • Connects back to the subject so nothing reads as filler

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