Master of Arts (by dissertation) — Media Studies postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Most of the calls I take at a mobile network's customer care centre are about data bundles that seem to vanish. After a year on the phones, I can usually tell within a minute what has happened: an app updating in the background, a video set to autoplay, or a voice note forwarded to a family group that someone has opened forty times. Callers rarely describe their phones as media devices. They talk about them as a monthly cost, a lifeline to relatives in the Eastern Cape, or the way they find out whether a taxi is running. That gap between how people use media and how they name it is what I want to study at master's level.

My undergraduate degree combined Media Studies and Politics. In my final year I wrote an honours research essay on how a minibus taxi association in my area used WhatsApp voice notes to circulate route changes and fare notices. With the chairperson's permission, I interviewed six drivers and two rank marshals. I also kept a log of the types of message shared in a public group over three weeks. The essay was small, and I was careful not to claim more than eight interviews could support. Still, it showed me something I had not expected. Voice notes were trusted partly because listeners recognised the speaker's voice. Written messages, even from the same person, were more often questioned. My supervisor encouraged me to connect this to debates about orality and media. I read sections of Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy. I found his idea of a "secondary orality" produced by electronic media useful, though I also had to think about where it fits a South African context and where it does not.

For a dissertation, I would like to build on that work more rigorously. My question is how people in low-income households weigh the cost of data against the value of different kinds of media content. I am especially interested in the choices behind audio, video and text. My job has made me aware that these decisions are constant and practical. A grandmother might save her bundle for Sunday so she can watch a church service stream. A teenager might download music only on a neighbour's Wi-Fi. I would want to explore methods such as media diaries and semi-structured interviews. I would also need to learn more about research ethics, since I would be working with people whose financial pressures I already hear about every day.

Working in a call centre has taught me some skills that I expect to carry into research. I listen closely, I take accurate notes while someone is speaking, and I keep to a script without letting it stop me hearing what the person actually means. I also handle a steady volume of work. During my first six months, I was asked to help train new agents on our complaints logging system. That showed me I can explain a process clearly to people who are under pressure.

Outside work, I sing alto in a community choir that rehearses twice a week. We learn much of our repertoire by ear from recordings our conductor sends out, which is another small reminder of how audio circulates. On weekday afternoons I look after my two younger cousins until my aunt finishes her shift. That means my reading for this application has mostly happened in the evenings, in short, regular stretches. I have found that this suits me, and I expect to organise independent study in the same steady way.

A dissertation-based master's appeals to me because I already have a question that I want to follow properly, with supervision and time to read widely. I want to move from noticing patterns on the phone to studying them carefully, and to write something that takes ordinary media habits seriously.