davidn

The process of writing personal statements, as told to me by Craig Muir in fifth year when we all had to send ours to universities, is the art of "BSing without actually lying". You have to make you and your meagre achievements sound as world-explodingly extraordinary as possible while at the same time remembering to stop short of making anything up. Using words of five syllables or more as often as possible also helps (I'm still very proud of squeezing the word "anthropomorphic" into the Dancing Robots report).

I think that this is an outdated practice, though. In a gap in doing anything at work (at the time this was written, the gap had lasted roughly sixteen hours) I decided to take the personal statement that I had sent them and revise it a little, changing the exaggerated claims and glossings-over in to things that are a little more realistic. Deleted text is strikethrough'd (struckthrough? You try turning it in to a verb), and new text has been italicised.

I have been interested in computer science for ~~most of my life~~ longer than anyone would care to admit, and a large amount of my time is spent ~~working~~ wasting time with computers. I am most familiar with Windows-based machines, although I have a limited amount of experience with Linux and Mac OS operating systems as well. This experience consists of mostly shouting at them for having different keyboard shortcuts and otherwise not doing what I want them to.

During secondary school I was often contacted for assistance with computer systems by idiots who couldn't plug in their printers, and Computing Studies was the subject that I most enjoyed because among the alternatives were Maths, English and Home Economics. In sixth year (2001-02) I took a sixth Higher on the subject which was a complete holiday, because we had to be bussed to a neighbouring town on Fridays to take the course as it had not been provided as an option during the year I took the rest of my Higher exams, and spent a lot of time on extra-cirricular activities such as being the compiler and editor of the school’s Yearbook. In fact I didn't really bother with the rest of my classes at all, gave up my two Advanced Highers and ended up with nine hours of class a week, with my first period last thing on a Tuesday.

In this final year of school, I was selected as a Prefect - this mostly involved policing the school and reporting any problems to ~~higher authority~~ the evil Deputy Head. I'm really scraping the barrel here, but I'm trying to make myself seem responsible. I was also responsible for leading a group of first year pupils on an outdoor excursion at the beginning of the year - this involved ensuring their safety. And that wasn't easy, because the majority of the activities involved them performing suicidal leaps off eight-metre telegraph poles and running round a forest blindfolded.

At the University of St Andrews, I have gained experience in Java, C, SQL and HTML (despite all this, I have little or no actual ability in any of them) along with more general experience in working independently and taking responsibility for learning without supervision. The pomposity of all this is just obvious now.

During the Junior Honours year, all students reluctantly took part in a software team project, encouraging not only teamwork with members of a group but also collaboration between all groups to produce an integrated product (in this case, a set of co-operative dancing robots). I know, we couldn't believe it either. My role in this project involved ~~the creation of a stand-alone program to generate XML files according to a standard laid down by others~~ cobbling together a program to write dances, and also ~~proofreading and editing most of the documentation produced for the project~~ making up increasingly extravagant claims to put in the weekly logs so that it appeared the team had actually done something worthwhile. A limited amount of organising meetings unsuccessfully within the group was also my responsibility as the end of the project approached, as the official team leader had other commitments, namely being expelled from halls for throwing a trolley out of a fourth floor window.

I contribute to a wide number of Internet communities, most significantly “The Daily Click”, an amateur ~~multimedia authoring~~ game-making site populated by idiots of which I have been an administrator since 2003, after inexplicably being handed the access by the head admin. My responsibilities include supervising the forums, providing advice to others when it is requested, resisting the temptation to kill them for asking stupid questions, remaining unbiased and level headed when conflicts arise among other members of the community and resolving them. This normally involves liberal use of the Lock Topic, Delete and Ban User buttons.

I can't take this any more, here comes the sick-making ending. I feel that I am a responsible and trustworthy individual who can work without supervision, and have considerable skills in the correct use of English, a quality which is becoming rarer and rarer as people grow more stupid by the day. I am also obsessively punctual and good at ~~keeping deadlines~~ creating the illusion that I'm working.

This, I think, is the way forward. If honest things like that were sent to employers, then choosing a candidate would be much easier. Or, once the system was established, I could just go back to the old trend and creatively exaggerate things, and could get any job with comparative ease.