Accounting and Analytics (M.Sc./P.Grad.Dip.) postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

At the end of each quarter, the garden centre group where I work as an accounts assistant runs a stocktake across its three sites. For my first two years the results reached me as handwritten count sheets, which I keyed into a spreadsheet and compared with the stock figures in our accounting system. Last spring I noticed that compost and bark mulch showed write-offs at one site almost every quarter, always in the same direction. Rather than simply posting the adjustment, I pulled two years of purchase and sales data into Excel, built a pivot table by product and month, and found that bulk bags sold at the till were being recorded under the wrong unit of measure. The fix was a change to a product code, not a security problem. It was a small piece of work, but it showed me that the useful part of my job was not processing figures but asking why they looked the way they did. I want postgraduate study in accounting and analytics so that I can do that properly, with stronger technical tools and a firmer grounding in accounting theory.

My degree in Business Management included introductory financial and management accounting, statistics and a module on information systems. I enjoyed the accounting modules most because they combined rules with judgement. My dissertation looked at how ten small Irish charities presented restricted and unrestricted funds in their published accounts. I coded each set of statements against a simple checklist and found wide variation in how clearly donors could see what money was available for general use. The project taught me to read notes to the accounts carefully and to be cautious about what a small sample can show. It also left me wanting to understand reporting standards in more depth than an undergraduate business course allowed.

Since graduating I have tried to close some of the gaps in my technical preparation. I completed a free online course in SQL and now use simple queries to extract sales data rather than waiting for monthly exports. I have started learning Python through evening tutorials, and I can clean a dataset and produce basic charts, although I am aware I am a beginner. Reading Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow made me more alert to how quickly I jump to explanations when numbers look odd, which is part of why I now check the data before assuming a cause.

Work has given me practical habits that I think will serve me on a demanding course. I reconcile supplier statements, prepare VAT working papers for review and handle month-end accruals under the supervision of our financial controller. I have learned to keep clear audit trails, to document my workings so that someone else can follow them, and to ask questions early rather than guess.

Outside work I coach an under-twelve camogie team on Saturday mornings, which involves organising fixtures, managing parents' expectations and making sure every child gets game time. I also help my father with the paperwork for our family's dairy farm, including the records needed for grant schemes and milk collection payments. Neither is glamorous, but both have made me organised, patient and comfortable explaining figures to people who do not enjoy them.

In the longer term I would like to work in a finance or advisory role where data analysis supports decisions, possibly with organisations like the charities I studied, which often lack the capacity to examine their own figures. I am looking for a course that will develop my statistical and programming skills alongside rigorous accounting, and I am ready to commit fully to the workload this involves.