Anthropology and development studies personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

For three years I drove and helped run a community minibus, collecting people for hospital appointments, shopping trips and a lunch club. What struck me was how differently people explained the same service: some passengers called it charity and were reluctant to use it, others treated it as a right they had paid for through years of work, and the volunteer committee talked about it as neighbourliness. The route was fixed, the timetable was fixed, but the meaning of it was not. I began to notice that decisions about funding rarely took those meanings into account, and that the forms we filled in counted journeys rather than what the journeys were for. That is what drew me to anthropology, and specifically to a degree that joins it to development studies. I want the tools to describe how people actually organise support, exchange and obligation, and also to understand the institutions, budgets and policy language that shape what is possible for them. Reading Jason Hickel's The Divide during my Access course sharpened this, because it pushed me to think about development as a set of historical relationships between places rather than a ladder that some countries have simply climbed more slowly. I am interested in questions that sit awkwardly between the two disciplines: who is consulted, whose knowledge is treated as evidence, and what happens to a project when the people it targets have their own priorities. Studying this full time, after years of working at the receiving end of schemes designed elsewhere, feels like the right use of my time rather than a change of direction.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

I left school at sixteen with GCSEs including grade B in English and grade C in Maths, and went straight into work because that was what was expected and affordable. Returning to formal study at thirty has been demanding and better than I expected. I am currently completing an Access to Higher Education Diploma in Humanities and Social Sciences, taking units in sociology, history, research methods and academic writing, and I have so far been graded at Distinction in most assessed units. The sociology units introduced me to Durkheim, Weber and later feminist critiques of classic theory, and I found the methods unit genuinely useful: designing a small questionnaire taught me how easily a badly worded question produces the answer you were hoping for. My longest piece of written work was a 2,500-word essay on whether microfinance reduces poverty, for which I read case study material on lending groups and learned to be careful about generalising from one country to another. I also improved my referencing, which I initially found fussy and now understand as a way of showing where an argument came from. Alongside this I worked through Nigel Rapport and Joanna Overing's Social and Cultural Anthropology: The Key Concepts, using the entries on reciprocity, ethnicity and the person to fill gaps in my vocabulary, and I have been reading ethnographies for pleasure, most recently one on market traders. Studying in the evenings around shifts has made me organised about deadlines and honest about how long reading actually takes.

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

My working life has given me a lot of contact with people and with paperwork. In supermarket distribution I worked nights on inbound stock, and later helped train new starters, which meant explaining the same procedure to people with very different levels of English and confidence. On the minibus service I booked journeys, kept records for the funder and dealt with complaints, including the difficult conversations when demand exceeded the seats available. I learned to listen without promising things I could not deliver, and to write notes that someone else could use the following week. For the past two years I have volunteered on Saturdays at a food co-operative run by our residents' association, weighing out bulk orders and taking a turn on the committee that decides on prices. Watching that committee argue about whether to keep prices low for everyone or lower for some has been an education in how distribution is a moral question as well as an arithmetical one. I keep an allotment plot with my brother, which has taught me patience and given me neighbours whose gardening advice contradicts each other's confidently. At home I share the school run for my nephew, so I plan my week carefully. I am comfortable in unfamiliar settings, used to being the person who asks the obvious question, and I can work steadily at something slow. Those habits seem relevant to fieldwork and to the kind of careful, unglamorous research this degree involves.

This example has 4,598 characters across the three answers. Use it for ideas and structure. Your own UCAS answers must fit within 4,000 characters in total, including spaces.