International studies personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

For the past two years I have written a fortnightly newsletter for about forty readers, most of them classmates and family friends, in which I take one international news story and compare how two or three outlets report it. It began because I noticed that a story about grain shipments leaving the Black Sea was framed as a trade story in one paper, a hunger story in another, and a military one in a third. None of them was lying. They were choosing which actors mattered. Doing this every two weeks has taught me that international politics is partly a question of who gets described as having agency, and that has made me want to study the subject properly rather than keep guessing at it. International studies appeals to me because it refuses to separate the strands I keep tripping over. When I tried to write about drought and migration in the Horn of Africa, I needed climate geography, colonial-era borders, remittance economics and the internal politics of aid donors, and I only had fragments of each. In History I have worked on the Cold War and on decolonisation, which showed me how much of the present institutional map was set in a short period by a small number of governments. I would like to examine international organisations closely, including where they have limited power and why states still use them. I am also drawn to the language element of these degrees. Speaking Somali at home and English everywhere else has made me aware that translation is never neutral, and I would like to add a third language and read sources that are not filtered through English-language wire services first.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

History, Geography and Sociology have given me complementary habits of thought. History has been the most demanding: the coursework unit asked me to assess competing interpretations of the causes of the partition of India, and I learned to read historians as people writing from particular positions rather than as neutral reporters. That changed how I read journalism too. Geography has supplied the material side of my interests. A unit on global systems introduced me to trade flows, migration and the geography of development measurement, and I became interested in why indicators such as GDP per capita and the Human Development Index can rank the same country very differently and what that does to the policy conversation. My fieldwork investigation looked at retail change on a local high street, which was small in scale but taught me to design a question narrow enough to answer with the evidence I could actually gather. Sociology has been useful for concepts I now use constantly, particularly around institutions, identity and the difference between correlation and explanation. Outside the syllabus I have read Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom, whose argument that development should be judged by what people are actually able to do, rather than by income alone, gave me a clearer vocabulary for my newsletter. I have also been following the podcast and long-form output of a few international affairs outlets, and I keep a notebook of terms I do not understand so that I can look them up properly rather than skim past them.

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

Since Year 12 I have worked Saturdays and some holidays in a bakery. It is ordinary work, but serving a queue of fifty people in two hours has made me calm under pressure and quick at reading what someone needs when they are stressed and in a hurry. I handle stock counts on Saturday afternoons, which is where I first became genuinely interested in supply chains, because our flour prices moved noticeably over one summer and my manager explained which of her suppliers had changed. I volunteer fortnightly at a community centre conversation group for adults learning English, mostly people who have arrived in the last few years. My role is simply to talk, prompt and be patient. It has taught me more about immigration and asylum systems than any article I have read, and it has also taught me not to speak for people whose situations I only partly understand. Several members now read my newsletter and correct me, which I welcome. At home I am the eldest of three, so I do a fair amount of cooking, school-run organisation and homework supervision, and I have become efficient with my own time out of necessity. At school I helped run a lunchtime current affairs discussion group with a friend, agreeing a topic each week and finding two short readings with different views so that people arrived with something to argue about. Keeping fifteen people to a reasonable standard of disagreement was harder than preparing the material. I want to carry all of this into a degree where reading widely, listening carefully and writing clearly are the main tools.

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