Archaeology and Social Anthropology MA (Hons) personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

On Saturday mornings I work the counter of a family bakery in our town, and by half past eight I can usually predict who will come in next. The retired miners arrive first and talk about the weather and the football before ordering. The younger parents come later, order quickly and rarely stay. Nobody planned this pattern, yet everyone follows it, and newcomers pick it up within a few weeks. Noticing how much unspoken order sits inside an ordinary shop first drew me to social anthropology. Archaeology appeals for a related reason: it asks what people did, and why, when nobody wrote it down. I want to study the two together because each seems to sharpen the other. Anthropology shows how meaning is attached to objects and routines in living communities, while archaeology tests ideas about the past against the material that actually survives. Kate Fox's Watching the English showed me that careful, often humorous observation of everyday habits such as queuing can be serious study. It also made me think about how different that is from inferring habits from a midden or a floor plan.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My Advanced Higher History project examines how the mining village two miles from my home changed between 1851 and 1901. I used census returns on microfilm at our local library and successive Ordnance Survey maps from the National Library of Scotland's online collection. With them I traced new rows of miners' cottages appearing and households growing larger. The hardest part was deciding what the records could not tell me: a census lists occupations but says nothing about how people spent their evenings. Walking the village with the old maps, I found the line of a demolished row marked only by a change in the pavement and a bump in a back garden. That made me realise how much of the past survives as ground rather than text. In Higher Geography I learned to collect and present fieldwork data, and English has trained me to read closely and argue clearly. Matthew Johnson's Archaeological Theory: An Introduction helped me see that interpretation depends on the questions asked. The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow challenged the neat sequence from small bands to states that I had absorbed without questioning. I do not yet know enough to judge all its arguments, but it convinced me that evidence from both disciplines can unsettle familiar assumptions.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

I have belonged to a local orienteering club since I was eleven. Competing has taught me to read contours, ditches and old walls quickly, and to notice when the ground does not match the map. Last spring the club's coordinator asked me to plan a course for a weeknight training event in a country park. I spent several evenings checking control sites and rewrote two legs after finding that a path had been fenced off. On the night, about thirty people, from juniors to veterans, completed it. Seeing everyone come back with different route choices, and hearing them argue cheerfully about which was best, was a small but real satisfaction. At the bakery I am now trusted to open the shop with the owner, and I have trained two newer Saturday staff on the till and the order book. The job has made me patient and comfortable talking with people of very different ages. It has also shown me that listening is often more useful than asking questions directly, which I expect will matter in ethnographic fieldwork. At university I would like to try excavation for the first time and learn anthropological methods properly. I am ready for the reading and independent work that both disciplines demand.