Master of Arts (by coursework & dissertation) — Film & Television Studies postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

One evening last year, a caller to the pay-TV contact centre where I work asked me why the English subtitles had disappeared from her soap. She did not need them for the isiZulu scenes, she explained, but her husband did, and without them he had left the room. The fault was a technical one and was fixed within the hour. Her call stayed with me because she described subtitles as part of a household arrangement rather than a translation tool. That question of how people share television across languages is what I would like to study at Master's level.

My Honours research essay looked at multilingual dialogue in South African daily soaps. I chose a sample of episodes from one long-running drama and logged every scene where characters switched between languages. I then compared what was said with what the subtitles showed. My argument was modest. Subtitles often smoothed a switch into flat English, so the social meaning of the change disappeared on screen. An example would be a character moving into Afrikaans to sound formal, or into township slang to sound close. My supervisor pushed me to stop treating this as a failure of translation and to ask instead who the subtitles were written for. That shift turned a list of discrepancies into a discussion of imagined audiences, and it is the part of the essay I am proudest of.

The reading that shaped this most was Raymond Williams's Television: Technology and Cultural Form, especially his idea of flow. Williams argued that broadcast television is experienced as a planned sequence rather than as separate programmes. I found it useful but limited for my material. The viewers I was thinking about were not only moving through an evening's schedule. They were also moving between languages within a single scene, and sometimes between screens in the same room. I would like to test whether flow can account for that, or whether it needs to be adapted for multilingual households watching across broadcast and streaming.

Working at the contact centre has given me an ordinary but steady view of how viewers talk about television. Most calls are about billing or decoders. Enough of them concern schedules, repeats, missing episodes and subtitle options that I have started noting, without any personal details, which complaints recur. I am not treating this as data. It has, however, made me sceptical of any account of audiences that does not include the remote control, the catch-up menu and the argument over who chooses. The job has also made me patient on the phone, quick to summarise a problem, and comfortable explaining technical things to people who are frustrated. All of these should help in seminars and in any interviews a dissertation might involve.

Outside work, I play social netball on Tuesday evenings and fetch two younger cousins from school three afternoons a week. The school run has nothing to do with film. It does mean I plan my reading around fixed hours, and I have become efficient at it. I usually work through a chapter in the car park before the bell.

I want the coursework element of a Master's to give me a firmer grounding in television theory and in audience research methods than my Honours year allowed. I would like to approach a dissertation that extends my soap opera project. It would move from analysing subtitles on screen to asking how multilingual viewers actually use them. I hope to sharpen the question during the coursework and to choose methods I can carry out properly and ethically. I am applying because I have a specific question I have already started on and a clear sense of the training I still need to answer it well.