Advanced Business (Honours) personal statement example

Personal statement example

Every Sunday at about two o'clock, my supervisor at the garden centre wheels out the markdown trolley. Bedding plants that have started to look tired go on it at half price, and I am usually the one sticking on the yellow labels. For months I assumed the timing was arbitrary. Then I asked, and learned it was a compromise. Too early and customers who would have paid full price wait for the discount. Too late and the plants are compost. That conversation made me notice that small decisions in an ordinary business balance stock, customer behaviour and staff time. That balance is what I want to study.

Economics A level has given me a vocabulary for some of this. When we covered price elasticity of demand, I thought about the regulars who buy compost whatever it costs and the browsers who only pick up a hanging basket when it is reduced. In Maths, statistics work on sampling and correlation has made me more careful about what I can claim from what I see. Geography has been useful in a way I did not expect. Our unit on changing places and urban regeneration led directly to my independent project.

The high street in my town has several empty shop units, and people often blame online shopping. I wanted to see whether the picture was that simple. From September to February I walked the same stretch on the first Saturday of each month and recorded which units were occupied, what type of business was in each, and any changes. I also spoke to six shopkeepers who agreed to answer a short set of questions about rent, footfall and why they had chosen that location. The results were more mixed than the usual story. Two units turned over between food businesses within the period, and the owner of a phone repair shop told me his trade depended on being near the bus station rather than on passing shoppers. I cannot generalise from one street and six conversations, and I said so in my write-up. But the project taught me to collect evidence patiently, to design questions that people will actually answer, and to resist the neat conclusion I had started with.

Reading Tim Harford's The Undercover Economist while working on it helped me frame what I was seeing. His explanation of how scarce, well-placed locations allow businesses to charge more made me look again at why the units nearest the station rarely stayed empty for long. It also made me curious about questions the book only touches on, such as how a small owner decides whether a lease is worth signing at all.

My job has given me practical habits as well as ideas. I have been trusted to cash up the till at the end of shifts and to train two new Sunday staff on the card machine and returns procedure. During the spring rush I learned to stay polite and accurate when the queue reached the door. These are modest responsibilities, but they have shown me how much a business depends on routines that customers never notice.

Outside school and work I compete with a local orienteering club. It has nothing to do with business, though planning a route under time pressure, and choosing a slower path that I can follow reliably, has made me more comfortable deciding with incomplete information. I also walk an elderly neighbour's dog on weekday evenings, which keeps my week organised around someone else's needs as well as my own.

I am looking for a demanding business degree with a research element because I enjoy the stage after noticing something, when I work out how to test it properly. I would like to build on my small-scale investigation with stronger methods, and to understand organisations from the markdown trolley up to strategy.