Information science personal statement example

Personal statement example

On Saturdays I work at a charity bookshop, and the first job of the morning is sorting the donation bags. Someone has to decide, quickly, whether a battered travel guide from 2009 is worth shelf space, and where a novel that is half romance and half crime should go. The manager's rule is that customers should find things the way they actually look for them, not the way a publisher would label them. Watching people browse has made me notice how much depends on those small decisions: a cookbook shelved under 'Health' rarely sells, while the same book under 'Food' goes within a week. I want to study information science because I have become curious about why some ways of organising things work for people and others quietly fail them.

That curiosity turned practical last year. Our parish has printed a monthly newsletter since the 1970s, and the back issues sat in boxes in the church hall. When the volunteer who looked after them asked whether anyone could make them easier to search, a friend from my Computer Science class and I offered to help. We agreed a clear division of work: she scanned the issues on the library's flatbed scanner over several weeks, and I designed a simple spreadsheet and tagging scheme so each issue could be searched by year, topic and names of local groups mentioned. We finished around 140 issues before our exams. The hardest part was not technical. My first tag list had nearly sixty categories, and when I asked the volunteer to test it she could not remember which to use. I cut it to eighteen and added a free-text notes column, which she found far easier. It is now used to answer the occasional enquiry from people researching family history, which is modest but genuinely useful.

At school, Computer Science has given me a grounding in data structures and databases, and our coursework project, a booking system for a local badminton club, taught me to write requirements by talking to real users before writing code. English Literature has developed a different skill: reading closely and recognising that the same text can be interpreted in several ways, which is a fair description of the difficulty of describing a document with a few keywords. Geography introduced me to GIS in a fieldwork unit, where we mapped flood risk data, and I was struck by how much a map's choices about what to show shape the conclusions a reader draws.

Outside school reading, I read Safiya Umoja Noble's Algorithms of Oppression, which argues that search engine results reflect commercial and social biases rather than neutral relevance. It made me think again about my tagging scheme: even deciding which local groups deserved their own tag was a judgement about who mattered. I do not have answers to those questions yet, but I would like to study them properly, alongside the technical side of building systems.

Away from screens, I play at a local chess club, where I help keep the record of league results, and I walk an elderly neighbour's dog most weekday evenings. Neither is connected to my subject in any grand way, though the chess club did teach me that a tidy results spreadsheet saves arguments.

What I bring is a habit of noticing how people actually look for things, enough programming to build something workable, and the patience to change a design when the person using it struggles. I am applying to study information science because it brings together the parts of my education I enjoy most, and I am keen to learn how to do this kind of work with far more rigour than a bookshop shelf or a box of newsletters allows.