Business Administration, DBA postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

On Monday mornings the returns cage at the food wholesaler where I work is usually full. It holds dented tins, short-dated yoghurts and cases that customers say they never ordered. For six years I have supervised the team that sorts it, and for most of that time each return was recorded on a paper slip before being typed into our stock system by hand. Two years ago we trialled handheld scanners that would have removed the slips entirely. The trial worked. Within four months, two of the three shifts had quietly gone back to paper. Why a better routine was abandoned by the people who had tested and approved it is the question that has brought me to doctoral study in business administration.

My first degree was in business management, and my dissertation looked at how six independent bakeries in my home town negotiated payment terms with their flour and dairy suppliers. I interviewed the owners and compared what they said with the invoices they were willing to show me. Several described terms they believed were standard but which in practice they had never asked to change. That gap between formal options and what people actually do has stayed with me, and I now see it every week at work.

After graduating I joined the wholesaler as a warehouse operative and became a shift supervisor three years later. My responsibilities are practical: rotas for eleven staff, picking accuracy, and the returns process. When the scanners slipped out of use, I spoke to colleagues on each shift rather than issuing a reminder. The reasons were varied and mostly sensible. The night shift found the screens hard to read under the loading-bay lights, one team leader trusted slips because they could be checked by the driver at the door, and nobody had been told what the data would be used for. I wrote a two-page summary for the operations manager, and we reintroduced the scanners with a brighter screen setting and a weekly report shared with every shift. Paper slips are now used only when a scanner fails.

This was a small change, but it made me want to understand organisational routines more rigorously than a single warehouse allows. I have been reading on my own, starting with Cohen and Levinthal's work on absorptive capacity, the idea that a firm's ability to use new knowledge depends on what it already knows. It helped me see that our night shift was not resisting change so much as lacking the shared context to make the new system meaningful. I have also read Teece's writing on dynamic capabilities, although I am less convinced that it explains how routines change on the shop floor of mid-sized firms, where decisions are rarely strategic in any formal sense. I would like to examine that level directly, perhaps through comparative case studies of process changes in distribution businesses.

Outside work I have been treasurer of my local allotment society for three years. The role is modest: collecting rents from forty plot holders, keeping the accounts and presenting them at the annual meeting. It has taught me to explain figures plainly to people who are sceptical of spreadsheets, and it moved our records from a ledger book to a shared file without anyone feeling left behind. I also play five-a-side on Thursday evenings, which is mainly how I keep my weekends free of work.

I am applying to doctoral study because I want to combine the access and questions that come from working in operations with proper training in research design, qualitative methods and theory. I am used to collecting evidence from people who are busy and sometimes wary, and to turning what they tell me into changes that hold. I would now like to produce findings that are useful beyond one returns cage, and I am ready for the sustained, careful work that requires.