Scandinavian studies personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

The reason I want to study Scandinavian studies is less a single moment than a habit I have built over three years. It began with borrowing translated fiction from the mobile library that stops near our village: Tove Jansson's The Summer Book, then Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses. What struck me was how often the landscape did the work that dialogue does in the English novels I was reading for school, and how much of the meaning seemed to sit in the spaces between what characters said. I wanted to know whether that was the writer, the translator, or something in the language itself, and I realised I could not answer that without learning to read the originals.

So I started teaching myself Norwegian, slowly and unglamorously, from a library course with cassettes that had clearly not been borrowed since the nineties, later supplemented by a beginners' podcast and the NRK website. I am now at the stage of following simple news articles with a dictionary open and being thoroughly defeated by anything spoken at normal speed. That gap is exactly why I want formal teaching. I am also interested in the questions that sit around the language rather than inside it: why Norway maintains two written standards, how Sami language rights developed through the twentieth century, and why the idea of a single shared Nordic culture is so appealing to outsiders and so often qualified by people who live there.

My A levels have pushed me towards the historical side of this. Studying the Reformation in History made me curious about how Lutheran state churches shaped literacy and local government across the region, and Geography has given me a vocabulary for talking about resource economies and periphery regions that I keep applying to what I read about northern Norway. Studying this subject at degree level would let me put the language, the literature and the history into one frame instead of pursuing them separately in my spare time. I am drawn to the year abroad in particular, because reading about a place is not the same as being unable to buy a bus ticket in it.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

I am completing A levels in English Literature, History and Geography at a sixth form college in Fife, having taken Nationals and Highers earlier in my school career before the family moved. English Literature has been the most directly useful preparation: a coursework unit on narrative voice let me compare an English translation of Ibsen's A Doll's House with a more recent version, and I spent longer than I should have on how differently the two rendered Nora's final speech. It was my first real encounter with translation as interpretation rather than transfer.

For my Extended Project Qualification I am writing on language policy in Norway, focusing on the coexistence of Bokmal and Nynorsk and how school language choice became a political question. I have had to be disciplined about sources, since most accessible material is either tourist-facing or written for specialists, and I have used English-language academic articles found through my college library alongside a Norwegian government information page that I worked through with a dictionary. The project has taught me to write to a word limit, to footnote properly, and to admit in writing where my evidence does not reach.

History has trained the skill I expect to use most: reading sources sceptically and placing them in context. I did well on an essay about nineteenth-century nationalism, and it changed how I read the Nordic folk material I sing in choir, much of which was collected and tidied up in exactly that period. Geography has given me the fieldwork habit of collecting data carefully and presenting it honestly, which I imagine transfers to any kind of research. Alongside lessons I keep a vocabulary notebook and have worked through a grammar workbook on verb tenses and word order, which has made me a much more attentive reader of English grammar too.

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

On Saturdays and through the holidays I work at a garden centre, mostly on tills and plant care. It is ordinary work but it has taught me to be pleasant to people at half past four on a wet afternoon and to explain things clearly to customers who have no background in what they are asking about. I have also covered the seasonal stockroom, which involved counting bulb deliveries accurately and flagging discrepancies rather than hoping nobody noticed.

For the past two years I have helped my grandmother with the knitting group she runs at our village hall on Thursdays. I set out chairs, make tea and keep the pattern library in order, and last winter I catalogued it properly: about two hundred booklets, sorted by technique and origin, including a shelf of Fair Isle and Scandinavian yoke patterns. Comparing them was genuinely interesting, since the traditions borrowed from each other across the North Sea far more than the labels on the booklets suggested, and one of the members who had lived in Denmark talked me through how the Danish instructions she had brought back were laid out. It is a small thing, but it is where I first understood that cultural connections in the north are practical and old, not invented for tourism.

I sing second alto with a community choir. We learned a set of Nordic folk arrangements last year, and I ended up writing rough pronunciation guides for the Swedish and Norwegian texts and checking them against recordings. Getting a whole choir to agree on vowel sounds is a useful lesson in patience and in being confidently wrong in public. Outside that I read steadily, keeping a notebook of what I finish, and I have begun rereading books I first met in translation to see what I can now pick out in the original. I also swim with a local club, which mainly keeps me organised. Between the reading, the language work and the commitments I have kept up for several years, I hope I can show that I sustain interests rather than sample them.

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