Interactive Digital Media (M.Sc.) postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

In the lobby of the small town museum where I tested my final-year project, a touchscreen had been showing the same welcome page for so long that the image had started to burn into the display. Over two afternoons I watched forty-odd visitors walk past it. Three touched it, and none got beyond the menu. That screen became the starting point for my undergraduate project, and it is why I want to study interactive digital media at postgraduate level.

My BSc in Computer Science gave me a solid grounding in programming, data structures and software engineering. I enjoyed the technical work, but the modules I returned to most were human-computer interaction and computer graphics, because they asked what happens when software meets people who did not write it. For my final-year project I built a tablet application for that museum, which has a collection of local maps and photographs. Instead of a menu, visitors drag a slider across a historic street map to fade between the 1890s and the present day, and tapping a building brings up a photograph and a short caption written with the volunteer curator. I wrote it in Unity, partly to learn a game engine outside my coursework.

The first version did what the specification asked, but in testing visitors kept trying to pinch and zoom, which I had not supported, and older visitors often missed the slider entirely. I added zooming, made the slider larger and animated it briefly on start-up so that it suggested how to use it. Over a second round of observation, people stayed noticeably longer. I kept simple notes rather than formal metrics, and in my write-up I was careful to say that this was small-scale evidence. The project received a first-class mark, and the museum still uses the tablet at weekends.

The project showed me the limits of my training. I could make things work, but I had little vocabulary for why one interaction felt inviting and another did not. Since graduating I have been reading to fill that gap. Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things gave me the language of affordances and signifiers, which described exactly what my animated slider was doing. Jesse Schell's The Art of Game Design has been useful for thinking about play and motivation outside games themselves, especially his habit of examining a design through a series of different questions.

For the past year I have worked as a library assistant. Much of the job is routine: issuing books, helping people with printers, and explaining the online catalogue, which is a regular lesson in how confusing interfaces can be. I also run a weekly board-game evening for teenagers and adults. Watching a group learn a new game teaches me a lot about rules and feedback. Some games are understood after one round, and others need constant explanation, usually because the board hides information players need. I have started sketching small digital prototypes of games that teach their own rules, which I would like to develop properly.

Outside work I play piano, mostly badly-sight-read film music, and I walk a neighbour's dog most evenings. Neither is connected to media design, though playing has made me more interested in how sound and timing shape the way an interaction feels, an area I have barely touched technically.

I am applying for postgraduate study because I want to combine my programming skills with a stronger grounding in design, narrative and audio, and to work on projects alongside people from different disciplines rather than alone. I would like to explore interactive installations for cultural spaces, building on the museum work, while being open to new directions. I am a careful, patient developer who learns from watching people use what I make, and I am ready to do that with more rigour and ambition.