Carol's Cottage

Hello! Welcome to this week's post. Lately I've been helping a friend with checking her personal statement, and it brought back a lot of memories (some great and some not so great) from my PS writing phase. Then I thought why not share my personal statement writing journey, and also my own PS that got me conditional offers from UCL, KCL, Edinburgh and also Warwick, by the end of this post. If you hadn't known already, I'm a Psychology student, thus my PS will be mostly about this subject. Without further ado, let's begin! My PS journey actually started way earlier than it should be , which was during Sem 1 of my A-level years. I knew before going into college, I wanted to apply to Oxbridge. With this aim in mind, I realised that I probably needed to put in a lot of extra effort in my academics and also my extracurricular activities, in order to qualify for an offer. Therefore I would try to set aside some time to self-study Psychology (since I didn't take this...

Hello again! In this blog post, I'll be writing about why I had to reject UCL in more detail. I briefly mentioned this in my last post , so if you haven't read it yet, please do so! If you want to of course :D Why I Wanted to Go to UCL If I'm being COMPLETELY, 100% honest with you, my main goal with applying for universities was that I just wanted to study in the UK. At the time of applying, I really wanted to go to Cambridge. It has been a dream of mine since I was a kid to be accepted into Oxbridge, even though deep down I knew I didn't stand a chance. Since we had to choose 5 universities to apply to, I had to pick which universities to go to for the other 4. I didn't really do much research on the other UK universities because I was so dead-on applying to Cambridge. Nonetheless, after doing a bit of research, I ended up really liking UCL because their modules were so interesting to me. Oh and the campus? Beautiful. Gorgeous. I really can see myself studying th...

Hi guys! Welcome back to my (supposedly) weekly blog :D I know, I missed out on last week's post, because I was...busy (a truer word would be: distracted) and I'm sorry! But I'm back to publishing a new post for the week, a continuation of last week's post. Happy reading! Season 3: Blood, Sweat, and Tears ( cue BTS music ) The main event for this semester was all about university applications . Naturally, this semester was going to be tough. But with the ongoing pandemic, and added stress that I got myself into, it was much worse than I expected. By this point, I already started my personal statement (PS) writing process. I'd done a lot of things out of my comfort zone to write out my final draft. Before the semester started, I already started to build my own website/organization called AcadStrive ( www.acadstrive.com , if you wanna check it out), as a side project to be included in my PS. But the problem with being the founder of my organization was, I had zero ...

On June 5th this year, I had just gotten back to Sabah, after being in my college for about 10 months without going back home during that time period. I had finally graduated from Kolej Yayasan UEM, after doing 2 years of A-level studies. Even though our batch did not have any formal graduation ceremony (it all got disrupted due to the pandemic), it was still a huge moment up to this point in my life that I realized I was finally going to end the most exciting yet the hardest and most painful 2 years of my life. In this blog post, I will be writing about what it was like studying at one of Malaysia's premier colleges. I will be dividing these 2 years into 4 different stages (one stage for each semester) because it really felt like living through 4 different TV show seasons when I was studying there. General view on what studying in KY was like : One of the best experiences of my life. I got to meet so many amazing people there like everyone was so unbelievably nice, and smart to...

Hello there! Welcome to my first-ever blog. I had been putting this idea off for a while, but I thought today is the day that I finally take action.  Just a little bit of info about myself: Hi, my name is Carolina, or, as most of the people in my life call me, Carol . I'm a 20-year-old, A-level, KYUEM graduate student who is currently waiting for her enrollment into university, which will take place in September. I'm from Malaysia (Sabah in particular) and will be going into UNMC as a Yayasan Sabah scholar. A few of my favourite pastime activities would be reading, playing musical instruments, and maybe even exercising. Occasionally. Okay, that last one might be a lie. Oh, and I'm taking Psychology by the way (Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience to be specific because that sounds *fancy* ). But, you'll really get to know me after reading a few blog posts which I plan to submit once every week if this...Hobby? Venture? I'm not sure what to call it, succeeds to ...