Chemical Engineering application deadlines

A diagnosis that came after your GCSEs (or other exams) can explain results that don't reflect your ability. Universities won't adjust for it automatically: you need to tell them, through the routes below.

• Ask your referee to include it. The UCAS reference has a section for circumstances that affected your education. Your teacher can explain the late diagnosis, how it affected earlier results, and how you've progressed since getting support. This reaches all four universities and is the main route at UCL.
• Declare it on your UCAS application. Disability declarations are used to arrange support, not to judge your application. It also starts the process for support once you enrol.
• Use each university's own process: Bath's mitigating circumstances form, Sheffield's Disrupted Studies scheme, and Access to Leeds. See the Mitigating circumstances notes under each university above.
• Get exam arrangements for exams still to come. Ask your school's exams officer, SENCo or IB coordinator about access arrangements such as extra time, a word processor or a scribe. Requests have deadlines, so ask as early as you can.
• Keep your diagnostic report. Universities' disability services and Disabled Students' Allowance (DSA) ask for it as evidence.
• Personal statement: you don't have to mention it. If you do, keep it short and focus on what you did next, such as strategies you developed or how your results improved.

Policies change each cycle. Email each admissions team before you apply to confirm how they'll consider your circumstances.

1. Why Chemical Engineering?

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

• Show you know what chemical engineers actually do: scale processes up from the lab to plants (separation, reactor design, heat and mass transfer, process control, safety), not just "chemistry plus maths".
• Pick one or two specific problems that excite you, e.g. green hydrogen, carbon capture, water treatment, battery materials, pharmaceutical or food manufacturing, plastics recycling, and say why they interest you.
• Trace a real moment that sparked your interest, then show how you followed it up (reading, a lecture, a project).
• Avoid opening clichés ("Ever since I was young…") and quotations. Get to your point in the first sentence.

2. How your studies have prepared you

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare for this course or subject?

• Link specific topics to the degree: rates and equilibria (reactor design), energetics and thermodynamics (energy balances), calculus and differential equations (process modelling), statistics (quality control).
• Mention a practical or investigation where you designed a method, handled error or improved a result, and what it taught you.
• IB students: use the Extended Essay and Internal Assessments. Say what you investigated, what went wrong and how you adapted.
• An EPQ, Maths or Chemistry Olympiad, UKMT challenges, or coding you've used to model data all count, as long as you reflect on them.

3. Beyond the classroom

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

• Work experience or virtual work experience in industry, at a utility, a lab, or a manufacturing site. Say what you learned, not just what you saw.
• Engineering summer schools and taster courses (e.g. Smallpeice Trust, Headstart, university open days and taster lectures).
• Responsibility and teamwork: a part-time job, Duke of Edinburgh, team sport, tutoring, running a club. Link each to a skill engineers need, such as working in teams, managing time or communicating.
• One or two examples you reflect on properly beat a long list.

Ideas for reading and exploring

• The Alchemy of Air (Thomas Hager): the Haber–Bosch process and how scaling up one reaction changed the world.
• Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air (David MacKay): free online; great for energy-balance thinking.
• Stuff Matters (Mark Miodownik) and Napoleon's Buttons (Le Couteur & Burreson): materials and molecules that shaped industry.
• IChemE (Institution of Chemical Engineers) student resources and case studies, Isaac Physics and Isaac Chemistry problems, and free online courses on edX or FutureLearn.
• Whatever you read, write what you thought about it, such as a question it raised or how it connects to your studies. Don't summarise the book.

Common mistakes

• Listing activities without explaining what you learned from them.
• Explaining textbook theory the tutor already knows.
• Writing mostly about chemistry or medicine and barely about engineering.
• Repeating your grades, which are already in your application.
• Using AI to write it. UCAS checks for copied or generated text, and tutors notice generic writing.