The quality of your personal statement depends heavily on how you use super-curriculars. Try to make sure that your discussion of super-curriculars is:

• Relevant – to the exact course you’re studying.

If you’re unsure about this, check out the university module lists below and tailor your statement to what they are teaching/offering. These also offer recommended reading, which are a great starting point for you to research different applications of economics.

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/current/ug/modules

https://www.lse.ac.uk/resources/calendar/programmeRegulations/undergraduate/2022/BScEconomics.htm

https://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/ba/PrelimReadingList.pdf

If you want to be hyper-focused on the course a certain university is offering, you could try to find a lecture/book etc. written by a professor at that university. For example, since I was applying to LSE, I referenced Tim Besley in my personal statement as he’s a professor there.

• Reflective – in considering what you’ve learnt, rather than simply regurgitating or explaining an economic theory. Provide some personal opinions and don’t shy away from agreeing or disagreeing with an economist, as long as you back up your conclusions with evidence. You could also try to link what you’ve learnt to the real world/current affairs or how a certain economic model/idea could inform policymaking.

E.g. you could explore how economics could inform climate change policy, regulating AI, reducing inequality etc. 

Clearly, some areas of economics lend themselves less well to having an opinion on than others. For example, it’s harder to be opinionated on econometrics compared to inequality economics, but you can still reflect on what you’ve learnt.in both. 

Some sentence starters to spark a personal comment could be: I began to question, this revealed/emphasised/made me realise, I believe/I think/I concluded, this challenged my assumption that/I was surprised by, I concur, I disagree

Here’s an example from my personal statement (referring to Stackelberg competition models)

Seeing how sequential output decisions enable a leading firm to use backward induction of a follower’s best response made me appreciate the profound impact of changing rules on rational behaviour. I assumed that this first-mover advantage in new markets may primarily explain the rise of large technology firms, but Philippon’s ‘The Great Reversal’ challenged my idea as he argued that their market power was established through unregulated lobbying against antitrust, and causes under-investment. I concluded that the over-step of free markets into politics harms long-run growth. 

• Well-motivated – your reasons for reading/watching/researching a certain topic should be clear, and you should try to smoothly transition between different super-curricular activities – try to have some ‘flow’ in your writing.

E.g. Reading about the future of economic growth in ‘Good Economics for Hard Times’ (a popular economics book) inspired you to investigate how economists formally model growth, leading you to complete an online course on the topic where you saw the mathematical foundations of the model etc.

Recently, the standard of personal statements as well as applicants have been increasing, so at least some of your super-curriculars also need to be reasonably challenging.

Try to avoid including more than 1 or 2 popular economics books that are widely known and accessible to the general public. They are still valuable for a personal statement, but your comments on them have to be more novel and insightful to stand out from other applicants citing the same books. I would use them as a starting point before going into something more niche/advanced and closer to an undergraduate level. I’ve colour-coded these types of books below.

Other books are so overused that they are not worth including in a personal statement (read only for interest) – Freakonomics, The Undercover Economist, the Armchair Economist et