Advanced Science (Honours) personal statement example

Personal statement example

Before every Thursday class, my dance teacher sticks a strip of yellow tape across one corner of the church hall floor. Underneath, the wooden boards sit directly on concrete instead of on battens, and she tells us not to practise jumps there. For two years I accepted this without thinking. Last spring I started wondering how much difference a floor could really make, and whether I could measure it with equipment I already owned.

My A level subjects are Biology, Chemistry and Maths, and I chose them because I enjoy subjects where an explanation can be checked. A Biology lesson on the structure of cartilage gave me the starting point. If the floor absorbs less energy, more of the impact must be taken up by the joints, so the deceleration of the body on landing should be sharper. I used the phyphox app on my phone, strapped in an armband to my lower back, to record acceleration as I landed from the same small jump on three surfaces: the sprung section of the hall, the taped corner, and our kitchen floor at home. I did twenty landings on each and tried to keep my technique the same.

The results were messier than I expected. The peak readings on the taped corner were consistently higher than on the sprung boards, but the spread within each set was large, and I realised that tiny changes in how much I bent my knees mattered as much as the floor did. I ended up filming each landing from the side so I could discard the ones where my knee angle was clearly different. My maths teacher helped me see that comparing averages without looking at the variation would have overstated what I had found. I wrote it up as a short report for our school's independent research afternoon, and the part I was proudest of was the section on limitations, because it was honest about what a phone on one person's back can and cannot show.

This is why a broad science degree with research built in appeals to me. The project touched biology, physics and statistics at once, and I liked that I needed all three. I would like the chance to study several sciences properly before deciding where to specialise, and to learn how to design an investigation that answers a question cleanly rather than mostly revealing the problems with my method.

Outside school, I work Saturday mornings in a local bakery, starting at seven. I serve customers, but I also help weigh out ingredients for the afternoon batches, and I have become interested in why the bakers adjust the water in the bread dough on humid days. I have asked enough questions that one of them now explains the changes before I ask. The job has also made me reliable in a practical way: if I am late, the shelves are empty when the doors open.

On weekdays I walk my younger brother to his primary school before getting my own bus, which has taught me to organise my mornings and my homework around fixed times. Dance remains the activity I do purely for enjoyment. I am not training to perform professionally, but contemporary classes have given me patience with repetition and with being corrected in front of other people, which turned out to be useful when my first project draft came back covered in comments.

I am applying for a demanding science degree because I want to work at a level where my questions are taken seriously and where I have to meet a higher standard of evidence than my phone experiment allowed. I know I have a great deal to learn about method as well as content, and that is the part I am most looking forward to.