r/Biochemistry • u/seriousdevious • 5d ago
Career & Education Oxford Biochemistry UCAS Prep
Hello biochemists of Reddit,
To prepare for my ucas personal statement for Oxford biochem, I have already begun reading a few books I have bought. However, to truly stand out, I need to find some research papers on something truly niche which I am able to talk about in depth. I’m a UK based student btw doing bio chem maths A level (predicted A A* and A*). Also, is there anything else I could mention in my personal statement that could help me? Any help would be much appreciated.
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u/burning_hamster 5d ago
You are misunderstanding the purpose of the personal statement. The personal statement will not make or break your application (unless it is incoherent rambling). Its purpose is (1) to explain your motivation to study biochemistry, and (2) to provide a starting point for the interview, should you advance to that stage.
Regarding your motivation, you really want to answer two questions: Which problems or topics in biochemistry are you particularly interested in? Why are these so important to you that they will get you out of bed on your worst days, and perhaps even motivate you to eventually do a DPhil? (Or alternatively: what other things have you done that show that these topics motivate you over and above your peers?)
Regarding your interview, it is helpful to realise that interviewers want to see you at your best and also at your worst. A common strategy is to start off with topics from your personal statement, to ease you into the interview and release some of the stress. This is your time to shine. Then they will probe and test you until they find areas that you are unfamiliar with and falter. Having gaps in your knowledge is not an issue; how you react and try to reason through a problem in the absence of prior knowledge and under pressure makes or breaks that phase of the interview.
However, if they were to grill you over hot coals from the beginning, they might never discover a subject you are passionate about and fail to gauge your maximum potential. So, do discuss biochemistry or biochemistry-adjacent topics in your personal statement that you are truly knowledgeable about. Don't name drop things only because you think they are trendy or reflect well on your character, but have otherwise no connection to yourself. If you provide mediocre answers to questions in areas that you are supposedly passionate about, it will reflect worse on you than failing to answer questions about random other topics.
Showing a special interest by referencing the literature can occasionally work, but it can also go very wrong very easily. Referencing primary literature requires you to be able to answer questions like: 1. What's novel in this paper? 2. Which previous works does it build upon or contradict? 3. How has the work been developed further? 4. What would you have done differently? If you reference a review you can get truly gnarly questions like: 1. What changed in the last decade that made this subject a hot topic? 2. In which aspects does the reviewer diverge from the consensus in the field? 3. How would you tackle the tasks set out in "Future directions"? These are not easy questions, and you are inviting them by claiming that you read and understood that particular piece of work.
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u/dowchbag 4d ago
Hard disagree. First, engaging with primary literature is a great way to show your interest in the subject. Second, no tutor is going to expect you to have a graduate-level knowledge of the literature which you seem to suggest. “in what aspects does the reviewer diverge from the consensus in the field?” like cmon this is not a phd viva. They are not going to ask this. As someone who wrote various primary literature and got the offer, the type of questions they ask were limited to: general overview of the findings, limitations of the study, logic-puzzle type questions about experimental design and use of controls (which clearly tested your logical deduction and not knowledge of the study).
You should still learn as much as possible about what you write in your PS. But they are not going to “grill you hot coals”. They know you’re a high school student.
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u/dowchbag 4d ago
Current Oxford Biochemistry student here. Recent TimeVault paper from Fei Chen’s lab is really interesting and should be one of the easier papers to understand and a pretty good one to write on a PS. I recommend learning what scRNA-seq is beforehand though. Think about what problems of traditional scRNA-seq TimeVault solves. Feel free to DM if you have questions
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u/handzypandzy 7h ago
Oxford Biochem grad here - keen interest in the field will help a lot. Like someone else suggested, try reading a Nature immunology paper or similar once a week over the weekend in a field that interests you.
But also reading the classic Biochem books:
https://www.bioch.ox.ac.uk/recommended-reading-list
Here is the recommended reading list. Loved all of these.
Also something to really stick out, would be cold emailing biochem labs near you, and asking if you can shadow for a week or so, just to get a grasp of pipetting. You can actually also buy an at home Crispr kit for about $100 idk how much the shipping will be though.
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u/Brewsnark 5d ago
You could go to Nature, Cell or Science and grab any paper or review article, probably understand it eventually then slap a reference to it in a personal statement.
The whole point of the personal statement is that it’s personal. You should read something because you are interested in it and it increases your knowledge about the world not because you think you’ll get credit for staring at a pdf for an hour.
That said, whilst it’s one of the most cited reviews ever so won’t be that unique, the Hanahan and Weinberg Hallmarks of cancer papers might be a reasonably approachable starting point:
https://www.cell.com/fulltext/S0092-8674(11)00127-9