Terrorism studies postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My dissertation began with a stack of microfilm and a fairly narrow question: how did two regional newspapers report a foiled plot in a city thirty miles from my home town? I expected to find sensationalism, and there was some. What I had not expected was how quickly the coverage shifted from the accused individuals to the neighbourhood they came from, and how rarely anyone quoted in the articles actually lived there. Coding around two hundred items over four months taught me more about the politics of political violence than any single reading did. It also convinced me that I want to study terrorism properly, with the methods and the caution the subject demands, rather than continuing to read around it.

My undergraduate degree gave me a reasonable grounding. Modules on security studies and on the politics of the Middle East introduced me to the debates about definition that shape everything downstream: if a state cannot agree what counts, it cannot measure trends, and it certainly cannot evaluate whether an intervention worked. I found Louise Richardson's What Terrorists Want useful for its insistence that organisations behave strategically rather than irrationally, and Arun Kundnani's The Muslim Are Coming? pushed me to think harder about how counter-extremism policy constructs the populations it addresses. I do not agree with everything in either, which is part of why I want to be taught by people who will make me defend my position. I also want to strengthen my methods. My dissertation used qualitative content analysis, and a supervisor's comment that my sampling frame was convenient rather than justified was fair. Structured training in research design, and in the problems of working with incident databases and open-source material, is a specific reason I am applying for a taught master's rather than reading on my own.

Since graduating I have worked full time in customer service at a garden centre, where I now lead a team of six on the tills and the returns desk. It is not a security role and I would not pretend otherwise, but it has been useful preparation in ways I did not anticipate. I spend a good deal of my week de-escalating frustration, explaining decisions I did not make, and writing incident notes that someone else has to be able to act on. Rota planning has made me realistic about the gap between a policy as written and a policy as delivered by tired people on a Saturday.

I also sit on the committee of a community boxing club and act as one of our safeguarding contacts, which involved completing a short accredited course and revising our reporting procedures so that coaches know who to tell and when. The club takes referrals from a youth worker and from a local school, and some of the young people who come through are exactly the sort described in prevention literature as vulnerable to influence. Seeing that up close, at the very ordinary level of whether a fifteen-year-old has anywhere to be on a Thursday evening, has made me sceptical of accounts that treat radicalisation as a purely ideological process. Last year I helped secure a small council grant for equipment by drafting the application and gathering attendance evidence; the grant was modest, but it was the first funding the club had applied for in years.

In the longer term I would like to work in local authority or third-sector prevention and community safety, where research is commissioned and used rather than produced. To do that credibly I need to be able to read the evidence base critically, understand its limits, and explain it to people who are not specialists. A master's in terrorism studies is the sensible next step, and I would come to it with a clear research interest and the habits of someone used to finishing what they start around a full working week.

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