International Public and Political Communication postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

The script I was given at the council contact centre for the new fortnightly recycling collections ran to four paragraphs, and residents usually stopped me after the first. They did not want the reasoning about contamination rates and vehicle routes. They wanted to know which bin, which day and what happened if they got it wrong. After a few weeks I started opening with the date and colour of the bin and keeping the explanation for anyone who asked. My team leader noticed that my calls were shorter and that fewer people rang back, and she asked me to help redraft the script for the wider team. That small rewrite is the most practical piece of public communication I have done, and it is a large part of why I want to study it properly at postgraduate level.

My degree in Politics and Sociology gave me the theory before I had the job. A second-year module on media and democracy introduced me to agenda-setting, the idea developed by McCombs and Shaw that the media are better at telling audiences what to think about than what to think, and to Robert Entman's account of framing as selecting and emphasising certain aspects of an issue to promote a particular definition of a problem. I found framing especially useful because it explained something I had seen in local politics: the same policy could be presented as a safety measure, a restriction or an environmental commitment, and each version invited a different response.

This became the basis of my dissertation, which compared how two English councils presented consultations on low-traffic neighbourhoods on their websites and social media accounts. I coded around two hundred posts and pages for dominant frames, tone and whether residents were addressed as participants or simply informed of a decision. One council consistently led with children walking to school; the other led with traffic data and maps. I could not claim that either approach caused the different levels of opposition each faced, and I said so in my conclusion, but the coding showed clear and sustained differences in emphasis. The project taught me to design a coding scheme, test it on a sample and revise categories that overlapped, which I expect to build on with more rigorous methods.

Working in the contact centre since graduating has added a perspective that my reading did not. I take calls on council tax, parking permits and waste, and I see how official language lands with people who are tired, worried or speak English as a second language. I have used the translated leaflets we hold in Polish, Urdu and Romanian, and noticed that some had been translated word for word from English text that was already unclear. This has made me curious about how governments and international organisations communicate across languages and political cultures, where the gap between intention and reception is much wider than in one borough.

Outside work I play tenor horn in a brass band that rehearses twice a week and performs at civic events and contests. It has nothing to do with communication theory, but it has made me comfortable with steady, collective work towards a deadline, and with being one part of a sound rather than the loudest.

I want to move from answering the questions that public messages create to understanding why they arise, comparing practice across countries and the relationship between governments, journalists and citizens. In the longer term I would like to work in communications for a public body or an international NGO, where clarity is not a matter of style but of whether people can act on what they are told. A taught Masters would give me the comparative grounding and research skills to do that work with more than instinct to guide me.