Applied Ethics and the Professions (Ethics and Emerging Technologies), MA postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Most weekday afternoons I sit at the digital help desk in a public library, and a surprising amount of my job involves text messages. Last winter a woman came in unable to reach her online benefits account because the security code went to a phone she shared with her adult son, who was at work. The system was doing exactly what its designers intended, and it was protecting her. It was also, that afternoon, keeping her out. Situations like this are why I want to study ethics and emerging technologies at postgraduate level. I am interested in how reasonable design choices shift burdens onto the people least able to absorb them, and in what professionals owe those people.

My undergraduate degree was a joint honours in Philosophy and Computer Science, which I finished with a 2:1. I enjoyed the technical modules, particularly databases and software engineering, but the philosophy shaped how I thought about them. A second-year course on autonomy and paternalism made me look again at familiar interface features, such as defaults, nudges and pre-ticked boxes, and ask when they respect a user's choices and when they quietly replace them.

My dissertation followed that question into health tracking. I examined the privacy policies and consent screens of four popular fitness apps. For each one I recorded what a user agrees to when they first set it up, and compared this with what the policy permits for sharing data with third parties. I used Helen Nissenbaum's idea of contextual integrity from Privacy in Context. Her argument is that privacy concerns whether information flows match the norms of the setting in which it was shared, rather than simply whether information is secret. This let me argue that a heart-rate reading given to a running app carries different expectations from one passed to an advertiser, even when both flows are technically covered by a single consent click. The weakest part of the project was my lack of evidence about what users actually understand. I could analyse the documents but not the people reading them, and I would like to develop more rigorous ways of connecting normative arguments with how technologies are used in practice.

The library job has given me some of that. I help people print boarding passes, set up email accounts, scan documents for job applications and recover forgotten passwords. I am not an adviser, and I am careful to stay within what my role allows. When someone needs help with a benefits claim itself, I refer them to the welfare rights service that runs drop-in sessions upstairs. Even so, I see each week how a design choice made far away becomes a practical problem at my desk, for example when a form times out after twenty minutes or an upload accepts only one file type. I have started keeping an anonymised tally of the problems that come up most often. My manager now uses it when deciding which short how-to sheets to print, and we have written three so far.

Outside work I ring church bells on Sunday mornings. Change ringing has taught me patience with method, because a mistake by one ringer affects the whole band. I also drive my younger brother to his college course twice a week, which mostly means that I listen to a lot of his music.

I want a masters course because my questions now need more than a dissertation's worth of reading. I would like to study the ethics of professional responsibility in technology alongside privacy and fairness, and to understand how codes of conduct, regulation and everyday design decisions relate to one another. Longer term, I hope to work where policy meets product, perhaps in public-sector digital services. I would like to be the person in the room who asks who gets locked out, and to have the training to turn that question into a useful argument.