Accountancy profile postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

The first auditor's report I read properly was on a delayed train home from a seminar. Until then I had treated auditors' reports as the page you skip to reach the numbers. This one, for a regional bus company, contained a section headed 'Material uncertainty related to going concern'. The accounts themselves looked ordinary. The warning sat in a few careful paragraphs explaining that the company's survival depended on government support that had not yet been confirmed. I wanted to understand how the directors and auditors had reached that wording, and why another operator in a similar position had not used it. That question became my undergraduate dissertation, and it is the main reason I want to continue to postgraduate study in accountancy.

For the dissertation I compared the annual reports of several UK bus operators for the years affected by the pandemic. I read the going-concern notes, directors' statements and auditors' reports side by side and coded how each described risk, which assumptions it disclosed and whether it presented downside scenarios. I had to learn the relevant auditing standard, ISA (UK) 570, well enough to tell the difference between a disclosed uncertainty and a modified opinion. The most interesting finding was not a difference in outcomes but in tone. Some companies gave specific figures for the funding they needed. Others used general phrases that were hard to test. I could not show why this happened from public documents alone, and I said so in my conclusion. That limit is part of what I want to address next. I would like to learn how auditors gather and weigh evidence about the future, which my dissertation could only describe from the outside.

Since graduating I have worked as an accounts assistant for a family-run bakery with five shops. My work is routine but real. I reconcile the bank accounts each week, match card-terminal settlements to till reports and prepare the VAT workings for the external accountant to review. When I started, the shops recorded wastage on paper sheets that reached the office days late. I built a simple shared spreadsheet so managers could log unsold stock at closing. That gave the owners a clearer weekly margin figure for each shop. It also taught me how much accounting quality depends on the habits of people who never think of themselves as part of the finance function. Seeing the external accountant's queries at year end has also shown me the questions an outsider asks when they cannot see the business every day.

My degree gave me a solid grounding in financial reporting, management accounting and auditing. My strongest marks came in the reporting modules, where I enjoyed working through lease accounting and impairment. I am less experienced in data analysis than I would like. I am currently working through spreadsheet and introductory database exercises in the evenings, because audit evidence increasingly comes from whole populations of transactions rather than samples.

Outside work I coach the junior section of a local chess club on Saturday mornings, mostly children aged eight to twelve. Running the sessions means planning, keeping records of results for grading and explaining the same idea several different ways. I also do the weekly shop for an elderly neighbour and sort her post with her. Sometimes that includes helping her read utility bills and bank letters, which has made me appreciate plainly written financial information.

I am applying for postgraduate study because I want to combine my reporting knowledge with a deeper understanding of auditing judgement, professional scepticism and the regulation behind them. In the long term, I hope to work in audit, where the question that started my dissertation is part of the daily work: what management claims, what the evidence supports, and how clearly that difference is explained to the people who rely on the accounts.