Media Arts and Sciences, MS postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Ten minutes before a keynote last spring, the venue projector began dropping its signal every few seconds. I work as an audiovisual technician at a mid-sized conference centre, and the fix turned out to be a cheap HDMI adapter overheating under the lectern. What stayed with me was not the repair but the speaker's reaction. She had planned her talk around a live demonstration, and when it seemed it might fail she began rewriting her opening in her head. The technology was not neutral background. It was shaping what she felt able to say. That interest in how people adjust themselves to the systems around them is why I want to pursue postgraduate study in media arts and sciences.

My first degree was in music technology, where I gained a 2:1. The modules I valued most combined signal processing with listening tests, because they forced me to treat human perception as data I had to respect rather than noise to filter out. For my final-year project I built a pressure-sensitive floor mat from velostat sheets and an Arduino, placed it in the foyer of my university library and mapped footsteps to a slowly shifting ambient soundscape. I expected people to play with it. Mostly they did not. Over two weeks of observation and short voluntary questionnaires, the more interesting finding was that some visitors slowed down or changed their route without seeming to notice the sound at all. I could not claim much from a small, informal sample, and I said so in my write-up, but the project taught me practical skills in sensor calibration and Max/MSP, and it left me wanting proper methods for studying responses that people cannot easily report.

My reading since graduating has followed that question. Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things gave me a vocabulary of affordances and feedback that I now apply, half-consciously, to the lecterns and microphones I set up at work. Dourish's Where the Action Is pushed me further, arguing that interaction is embodied and social rather than a matter of screens and commands. I found it demanding, and I am not sure I yet follow all of its philosophical background, but it described exactly what I had seen in the library foyer.

My job has given me a steady supply of small evidence. I set up rooms for academic conferences, trade associations and community groups, and I have noticed how differently a retired volunteer and a corporate presenter approach the same clicker. I wrote a one-page laminated guide for our lecterns, using large photographs instead of text, after colleagues kept being called to the same three problems. Requests for help at those events dropped noticeably, and my manager now gives the guide to visiting technicians. It is a modest piece of design, but it was tested on real people under real pressure.

Outside work I run a monthly synth-repair evening in the back room of a local café, where six to ten people bring broken keyboards and effects pedals. I am not an electronics engineer, and I am honest about the limits of what I know, but I can teach soldering safely and help people read a circuit diagram. The evenings have shown me how much confidence people gain once a device stops being a sealed box. I also cycle most weekends, which has little to do with media arts except that it is where I do most of my thinking.

At postgraduate level I want to develop rigorous ways of designing and evaluating interactive sound and physical interfaces, particularly in shared public spaces where users have not chosen to take part. I bring technical fluency, a habit of watching what people actually do, and a working life spent making technology behave for people who would rather not think about it. I would like to understand that work properly, and to build things that deserve the attention they ask for.