English and Philosophy personal statement example

Personal statement example

During a game night last year, four of us stopped playing for twenty minutes because the rulebook said each player "may" trade one card per turn. Two friends read this as a permission: you could trade, or not. I argued it also set a limit, so you could not trade twice. We eventually agreed to play it my way, but what stayed with me was how much depended on one small word, and how each of us was sure the sentence was obvious. I want to study English and Philosophy because both subjects treat that kind of certainty as something worth examining rather than simply settling.

In H2 Literature I have been most absorbed by texts where a narrator's language hides what he will not admit. Reading Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, I noticed how Stevens describes his father's death almost entirely through the duties he kept performing that evening. His sentences stay formal exactly when the reader expects feeling. This led me to write an independent essay of about four thousand words outside the syllabus, asking whether Stevens is morally responsible for serving Lord Darlington, or whether his idea of dignity made it hard for him to see what he was doing. To think about this properly I read Nigel Warburton's Philosophy: The Basics and Plato's Euthyphro. The Euthyphro helped me frame a question I had been circling: is loyalty good because of what it serves, or simply because it is loyalty? My teacher thought my conclusion, that Stevens chose not to look rather than being unable to, needed stronger evidence from the text, so I reworked two sections around specific passages. The final version is the piece of writing I am proudest of, because the argument came from close reading rather than from what I already believed.

History has made me more careful with sources. Comparing two accounts of the same event, I have learnt to ask what each writer needed to be true, which is a question I now bring to novels too.

Outside school, a classmate and I run a small book-swap shelf at the void deck of my block. The task is modest: we check it twice a week, remove anything damaged, and write short handwritten recommendation cards. We divided the work clearly, with her handling the cards in Chinese and me the English ones, and we keep a notebook of what people take. It has been running for eight months, and some neighbours now leave notes asking for particular authors. It taught me that a recommendation has to say why someone might enjoy a book in two sentences, which is harder than writing two pages.

On weekends I work at a stationery shop, mostly restocking, wrapping gifts and answering questions about which pens suit which paper. On weekdays I collect my younger brother from primary school and supervise his homework until my parents return. Helping him with English comprehension has shown me how often questions assume a reader already knows what counts as evidence. I also play badminton for my school's second team, which mostly reminds me that I enjoy something where I cannot think my way to a better result and simply have to practise.

At university I hope to study literature and philosophy side by side, reading texts closely while also learning to build and test arguments with more rigour than I can manage alone. I am particularly curious about ethics and the philosophy of language, and about how novels can explore moral questions in ways that formal argument cannot, and the reverse. I am prepared for reading that is slow and difficult, and I would like to become the kind of reader who can explain precisely why a sentence means what it does, including the word "may".