You already have a personal statement draft. Today you are applying it: one realistic future opportunity, one tailored variant, same person underneath.

If you do not have Draft 1 yet, use your strongest Strand 1.1 evidence notes and write a short starter tailored paragraph today.

The trap is rewriting yourself into whoever you think they want. Tailoring changes what the reader meets first. It does not invent a second identity.

Before you cut or reorder anything, commit to what three different audiences care about most. Work through the claims below on your honest first instinct: which lines are sound, and which are traps? You will meet the same idea again when you annotate a real tailored sample.

Today’s key moves sit on three words you already met: tailoring, audience, and variant.

Aoife kept one core identity and wrote a short apprenticeship variant from it. Label each marked phrase: core kept, audience emphasis, reordered or shortened, or cut as wrong fit.

When the model labels appear, notice where you disagreed. That comparison is the class activity for this block.

Then open your own draft and start Personal Statement Tailored V1 in your Strand 1.1 folder: one named real or realistic opportunity, a tailored version (about 200-350 words, or a tight one-page cut if the original is longer), plus three sentences on what you changed and why that audience needed it. This is ALT 1 evidence: a tailored variant of your personal statement. If you do not finish saving the file in class, complete and save it today as same-day portfolio work.

Read Tomas’s case in the worked example. He had a solid main draft, then “tailored” it for two doors and damaged both. Use the beats to decide what he should keep, what he should move, and what he should stop doing.

Talk through these prompts with the person beside you:

• For the HE version, what concrete fact should he put back, and what hollow phrase should he delete first?
• For the community traineeship, what should meet the reader in the first five lines, and how should he tell the truth about his coaching experience in one checkable sentence?
• What single tailoring rule would have stopped both failures?
• Look at your Personal Statement Tailored V1. Where are you closest to Tomas’s mistakes, and what will you fix before you save?

Then finish the three sentences under your tailored version: what you changed, what you kept, and why that audience needed the new shape. Save the file as Personal Statement Tailored V1 beside your main draft in Strand 1.1.

Optional stretch: write a second short variant for a contrasting audience (if your first was apprenticeship-shaped, try HE or community). Keep it to one tight paragraph plus two lines on what flipped between the two variants.

Save it beside Tailored V1 only if it stays honest to the same core. ALT 1 is stronger when you can show you reshape without reinventing.