Master of Science in Business Administration in Finance (MSCB) postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Most loan applications at the credit union where I work arrive as a payslip, three months of bank statements and a short form. My job is to turn those papers into a spreadsheet that a lending officer can read in five minutes: income, regular outgoings, existing debts and a note on anything unusual. After eighteen months I can usually tell from the statements alone whether someone's finances are steady or stretched. What I cannot do, with the tools I have, is say anything rigorous about why some members who look stretched repay reliably while others who look comfortable fall behind. That gap between practical judgement and formal analysis is what I want postgraduate study in finance to close.

My undergraduate degree in economics gave me a foundation in econometrics, macroeconomics and corporate finance. The module I enjoyed most covered asset pricing, particularly the idea that a price reflects expected cash flows discounted at a rate that compensates for risk. It sounds simple, but applying it carefully raised questions I found absorbing: what counts as risk, and how do you measure it when the data are noisy?

Those questions shaped my dissertation, which examined how discounts to net asset value in UK investment trusts changed around Bank of England rate decisions between 2015 and 2022. I collected monthly data for around forty trusts from public sources, cleaned it myself and ran panel regressions with trust and time fixed effects. The results suggested that discounts tended to widen after rate rises, especially for trusts holding less liquid assets such as property and private equity, although the effect was modest and sensitive to how I defined the event window. I learned as much from the robustness checks as from the main result. Seeing a coefficient shrink when I added controls taught me to be cautious about stories that fit the data too neatly. My supervisor's comment that the most valuable section was the one discussing limitations has stayed with me.

Work has sharpened my sense of what financial decisions look like in practice. The credit union serves many members whose incomes vary week to week, and I have helped redesign our affordability template so that it averages irregular earnings over a longer period rather than relying on a single month. It was a small change, agreed with the lending team, but it reduced the number of applications sent back for clarification. It also made me curious about household finance research, and I have since read parts of John Campbell's work on household finance, which frames the mistakes households make as a subject worth studying in its own right.

On alternate Thursday evenings I volunteer at a money-advice drop-in at our local library, helping people read energy bills, compare savings accounts and understand the interest on store cards. I do not give regulated advice; mostly I explain terms and point people to the right services. It has taught me to explain compound interest without jargon, which I find harder and more useful than explaining it with equations.

Outside work I play chess online, mainly rapid games, and have slowly pushed my rating up by reviewing my losses rather than playing more games. I find the habit of examining a position after the event carries over well to empirical work.

I am applying for a research-oriented master's in finance because I want deeper training in econometrics, asset pricing theory and empirical corporate finance, and the chance to undertake a substantial independent project. I am particularly interested in how interest rate changes pass through to households and less liquid markets, linking my dissertation with what I see at the credit union. I am well organised, comfortable handling messy data, and used to explaining my reasoning to people who need to act on it. I would bring that combination to a demanding programme and to whatever research I go on to pursue.