Master of Arts in Ancient Culture, Religion and Ethnicity (MA) postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

In a regional museum near my parents' house there is a small case of terracotta body parts: a foot, an ear, part of a leg. As a teenager I assumed they were broken statues. During my undergraduate degree in Classics I learned they were votives, objects ordinary people left at healing sanctuaries, and I have kept returning to the question they raise. What did religion look like for people who did not write about it?

That question shaped my final-year dissertation, which compared Greek curse tablets and anatomical votives as evidence for private religious practice. I worked from published editions and translations rather than original objects, and much of the work was learning to read those editions properly: noticing when a reconstruction depended on a scholar's guess, and separating what a tablet says from where it was found. The curse tablets were often deposited in graves or wells and addressed powers below the earth, while the votives were displayed openly in sanctuaries. I argued that the two practices should not be filed under 'magic' and 'religion' as if they belonged to different worlds, since both relied on objects, places and named recipients to make a request effective. My supervisor's comments pushed me to define my terms far more carefully than I had, and the final version was stronger for it.

Reading for that project led me beyond the Greek world. Mary Beard, John North and Simon Price's Religions of Rome showed me how much religious identity in the Roman empire was bound up with civic belonging, and how cults from elsewhere could be welcomed, regulated or treated with suspicion. I became interested in how communities marked themselves as distinct through practice, food rules, festivals and burial, rather than through doctrine alone. This is why a programme that brings culture, religion and ethnicity together appeals to me more than one focused on a single literature. I would like to look at how groups such as Jewish communities in Greek-speaking cities negotiated difference, and I know I need much stronger grounding in material culture and in the scholarly debates about ethnicity before I can do that responsibly.

My languages are a reasonable foundation. I read Latin and Greek through my degree and can work through prose with a lexicon, though I am slower with verse. I have started teaching myself Hebrew script and basic grammar from a textbook in the evenings, and while I am still a beginner, I want to continue formally.

Since graduating I have worked full time as a receptionist at a busy dental surgery. The job has nothing to do with antiquity, but it has made me organised and calm under pressure. I manage appointment lists for four clinicians, deal with anxious patients on the phone, and handle complaints without taking them personally. I have also learned to keep accurate records when nobody is checking them, which matters as much in research as it does in a clinic.

Outside work I help run the monthly jumble sale at our local church hall, sorting donations and pricing stock with two older volunteers who have done it for twenty years. I also go to a weekly pottery class. I am not a good potter, but trying to centre clay on a wheel has given me real respect for the skill behind even plain ancient pots, and it changed how I look at those votive feet in the museum.

I am applying for postgraduate study because I want to move from reading other people's conclusions to building careful arguments of my own about how ancient people lived out their beliefs and identities. I bring solid language preparation, a completed independent research project, and the steady working habits of someone used to a demanding job, and I am ready to be stretched further.