Medical anthropology postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My interest in medical anthropology grew out of a mismatch I kept noticing between two kinds of talk about health. In my undergraduate degree I was reading ethnographies in which illness was inseparable from kinship, work and moral judgement; at the same time, in my part-time job on the front desk of a GP practice, I was hearing patients explain themselves in three sentences before a ten-minute appointment. Neither account was wrong. What interests me is how the second is produced out of the first, and what gets left out along the way.

My degree gave me the foundations I want to build on. Alongside core social theory and ethnographic methods, I took options in kinship and in the anthropology of religion, both of which shaped how I now think about healing as a social practice rather than a technical one. I read Arthur Kleinman's work on illness narratives during my second year and found the distinction between disease and illness genuinely useful, though I was more struck by later critiques arguing that eliciting a patient's "explanatory model" can become another clinical procedure rather than a real conversation. I would like to work through that tension more carefully, particularly in relation to chronic conditions managed largely at home.

For my dissertation I spent several months with an allotment association in the city where I studied, attending work days and sitting in the shared shed with a flask of tea. I had expected to write about food and diet. Instead, most of what I recorded concerned remedies: comfrey for aches, nettle tea, what someone's mother had used, what a plot-holder had read online and half-believed. I argued that these exchanges were less about efficacy than about establishing who could be trusted to give advice, and that scepticism was performed as often as belief. The project taught me a good deal about the practical discipline of fieldwork: rewriting my interview guide after the first two conversations went nowhere, keeping legible notes, and recognising how much my presence shaped what people chose to tell me. My supervisor's main criticism, which I accepted, was that I had under-theorised the class dimensions of the site, and I would approach that differently now.

Since graduating I have continued interviewing in a modest way, recording short conversations with people about the health advice they grew up with and editing them into an audio series I share with friends and the participants themselves. It has perhaps forty regular listeners, which is not a large audience, but the editing has sharpened how I listen. I also worked with a coursemate during my final year to put together a small display for our department's open day on historical patent medicine advertising; she handled the images and I wrote the captions, and we learned quickly that one hundred words is a very unforgiving format for an argument.

My work at the surgery continues alongside this, and I volunteer weekly at a community lunch club where I mostly wash up and talk to the regulars, several of whom are managing multiple long-term conditions largely on their own terms. Both roles keep me attentive to the ordinary, unglamorous settings where health is actually negotiated.

I want postgraduate study to give me stronger grounding in the anthropology of biomedicine, in global health critique, and in research ethics and design, so that I can undertake a substantial piece of fieldwork on self-treatment and advice-giving outside clinical settings. In the longer term I am drawn to applied social research within health services, where I think careful qualitative work is often needed and not always commissioned.

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