This has always seemed bizarrely intrusive to me. What right do universities have to “capture the full picture of applicants’ lives?” Mind your own fucking business and just take the vast sum of money they are paying you for an education.

About 6 years ago an American friend’s son sent me his personal essay for university application. My first thought was “OK, this is clearly massive oversharing of irrelevant personal & emotional stuff that will count against you. You’ll need to remove all that and demonstrate your academic interest in the subject.” I was surprised because that was not his character. He was a reserved person. By American standards. But no. I was wrong. That was exactly what was wanted and the consensus from the other (American) adults he consulted was that it wasn’t open enough about stuff that Brits would consider private and definitely needed to include more overcoming of hardship and difficult life lessons. 😳

I mean, I think if you do genuinely have personal & emotional reasons for studying a subject and you are a particularly open person, you should be able to disclose them, but requiring people to do so seems like a humiliation exercise to my British sensibilities.