Economic policy postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

For the past nine years I have worked in a council revenues and benefits team, mostly assessing council tax support and discretionary housing payments. The work is administrative rather than analytical, but it has given me a clear view of how policy behaves once it reaches the people it is meant to help. I have explained tapers to residents who could not understand why extra hours at work left them barely better off, and I have seen how the timing of payments interacts with rent cycles. I want to study economic policy at master's level so that I can move from applying rules to analysing and improving them.

My first degree was in Economics and Politics. I enjoyed public economics and applied microeconomics most, and my dissertation examined the introduction of the single-tier state pension, comparing the distributional arguments made in parliamentary debate with the projected effects reported by the Institute for Fiscal Studies at the time. Writing it taught me how much of policy work involves reconciling competing accounts of the same measure, and how often disagreement is about assumptions rather than arithmetic. Graduating in 2013, I took a temporary contract at the council for practical reasons and stayed; I do not regret it, but I have known for some time that I wanted to return to the analytical side.

I have prepared deliberately rather than relying on a degree finished a decade ago. Over the past two years I have worked through an intermediate econometrics textbook and completed an online course in R, and I now use it for practice projects. Using published local authority data, I compared council tax support caseloads across neighbouring authorities and tried to account for differences in local scheme design; the exercise made me appreciate how quickly identification becomes difficult when policy varies with the characteristics that also drive outcomes. I have also revisited calculus and linear algebra through open-access materials, because I know quantitative demands at postgraduate level are higher than I remember. Reading Angus Deaton's The Great Escape sharpened my interest in how measurement choices shape what we conclude about living standards, and I follow the IFS Green Budget each year, partly for the analysis and partly to see how technical work is communicated to a general audience.

My employment has given me habits that I expect to be useful. I handle a caseload with statutory deadlines, so I am used to organising my own time and finishing work I would rather keep refining. I have trained four new assessors, which forced me to articulate why a rule exists rather than simply how to apply it. I also volunteer fortnightly at a community advice drop-in, where I help people with benefit letters and appeals. That has reinforced something I want to carry into academic work: administrative burden and take-up are not peripheral details but part of what a policy actually is.

From the master's I am looking for solid training in econometrics and public economics, and the chance to write a dissertation on the design of local welfare support, ideally using administrative or survey data to look at how discretionary schemes differ in reach. Afterwards I hope to work as an analyst, in central or local government, a research institute or a policy charity, contributing evaluation rather than commentary. Returning to full-time study at 34 is a considered decision; I have saved towards it and discussed the change with my employer. I am ready for the workload and keen to be a student again, this time with a much clearer sense of what I want the economics for.

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