Education in Museums & Heritage (Erasmus Mundus International Master) [IntM] postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

At the small town museum where I work on Saturdays, we keep a handling box of objects visitors are allowed to touch: a flat iron, a ration book in a plastic sleeve, a miner's lamp with the glass removed, and a pair of child's clogs. For a month last year I kept a tally of which object people picked up first. The clogs won by a wide margin, and children almost always asked whose feet they had belonged to. That question, which none of our labels answered, is a good summary of why I want to study education in museums and heritage. I am interested in the gap between what an institution thinks it is offering and what visitors actually want to know.

I studied History and Education Studies at university. The combination suited me because I was always drawn to how the past is taught rather than only to what happened. My dissertation looked at how primary school groups used a heritage centre at a former slate quarry near where I grew up. With the centre's permission, I observed six school visits, studied the worksheets teachers brought, and interviewed four teachers and two members of staff. What I found was modest but useful: the most successful visits were the ones where teachers had prepared the class beforehand with a single question, such as why the quarry closed, rather than a long list of facts to find. Worksheets that asked children to copy information from panels kept them busy but produced little discussion. I also noticed that the centre's Welsh and English panels were not equivalent, with the Welsh text often shorter, which raised questions about bilingual interpretation that I did not have space to pursue properly and would like to return to.

Reading for that project introduced me to John Falk's work on visitor identity and motivation, especially his argument that people's reasons for visiting shape what they take away. I recognised it immediately at work. Some families come because it is raining and the museum is free; others are researching a grandparent. The same display serves them very differently. I have started suggesting small changes within my role, and the curator let me write a short trail card for the handling box, asking families to guess each object's use before reading the answer. It is now offered at the front desk during school holidays.

My other job is a night shift restocking shelves at a supermarket, which pays my rent. It has taught me to work steadily through long hours and to explain tasks clearly to new starters, who often arrive with no idea where anything goes. That is a kind of teaching too, though I would not have called it that at first.

Outside work, I sing alto in a community choir that performs in chapels and care homes, and I help my grandmother with forms and letters, many of which she prefers to read in Welsh. Moving between the two languages for her has made me more alert to how much the wording of official information affects whether people feel welcome, something I now notice in museum text as well.

I am applying for postgraduate study because my experience so far is practical and local, and I want a stronger grounding in learning theory, evaluation methods and the wider international debates about who heritage is for. A programme with an international dimension appeals to me because I would like to see how institutions in other countries approach multilingual audiences and community involvement, and to test my assumptions against very different contexts. In the longer term I would like to work in a learning or engagement role, designing sessions and resources that begin with visitors' questions, including the ones our labels do not yet answer.