A personal statement is an academic promotional genre that is usually required in university or higher study applications. However, applicants often face difficulties in arranging a well-constructed personal statement with certain requirements in the format. Accordingly, the researchers conducted this study using genre analysis on a Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) 's personal statement, focusing on identifying its rhetorical structure or moves. The data used in this research was a personal statement written by Rachel Chloe. She is an Indonesian student that succeeded to be accepted by 5 (five) universities in the UK with each different undergraduate course that she had applied to, namely Information Management of University College London (UCL), Digital Culture of King's College London (KCL), Management Information Strategy and Entrepreneurship of University of Manchester, and Business Management of University of Warwick and University of Leeds. The personal statement was provided by Chloe herself electronically in one of her Youtube videos entitled 'Reading the Personal Statement that got me into UCL, KCL, Warwick, Manchester, Leeds' posted on August 24, 2020. Chloe is now a first-year Information Management student at UCL. This study applied the qualitative method. The result showed three moves identified, namely the introduction, establishing credibilities, and self-promoting. These three moves help form a concise yet clear personal statement, especially the UCAS designed due to the limitation of words. One of the benefits of this research is to explain to prospective students about the scientific method of writing a personal statement, which is used as one of the requirements for applying to universities abroad.

Keywords: genre analysis,  personal statement, rhetorical structure.