Arabic and Persian MA (Hons) personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

In my Higher Spanish class our teacher mentioned that 'ojalá' probably comes from an Arabic phrase meaning 'if God wills'. I started keeping a list: aceite, azúcar, almohada, many beginning with the Arabic article al-. That list led me to a basic question: what kind of language could leave so many traces in another so different from it? Learning that Arabic builds words from consonant roots, so that k-t-b gives kitab, a book, and maktab, an office or desk, felt like discovering that a language could be organised on a completely different principle from the ones I knew. Persian came into my reading through history rather than grammar, but the two quickly became linked for me. Persian is written in a form of Arabic script and has absorbed a large Arabic vocabulary, yet it is an Indo-European language with no grammatical gender and a structure closer in some ways to Spanish than to Arabic. I want to study both together because each seems to explain the other, and because I want to read the history I am interested in through the languages of the people who lived it.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

For my Advanced Higher History dissertation I am writing about the 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh's government in Iran, focusing on how British and American accounts have differed over time. Working with declassified material available in English made me aware of how much of the story I could only reach second-hand, and how often Persian sources were summarised rather than quoted. Eugene Rogan's The Arabs: A History gave me a wider framework for the region in the twentieth century, while Dick Davis's translation of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh showed me why the poem matters so much to Persian identity. I found his introduction on the problems of translating Ferdowsi's verse into English especially useful. Reading Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis alongside my dissertation research reminded me that political events also have a personal scale. Alongside school, I taught myself the Persian alphabet using free online resources and a secondhand grammar, practising by copying short lines of Hafez from a bilingual edition and checking letter forms that change position within a word. I can now read slowly and sound out unfamiliar words, which is modest, but it has shown me I can keep up steady independent study. Spanish has taught me the discipline of regular vocabulary review, and Modern Studies has given me practice in weighing competing sources on current politics. I want to distinguish what a document says from what later accounts select from it, while recognising the limits of my present language skills.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

I have worked Saturdays at a garden centre for two years, mostly on the tills and restocking the outdoor plant benches. In the spring rush I was trusted to train two new weekend staff on the till system and returns process, which taught me to explain things clearly and patiently without rushing people. Most evenings I walk a neighbour's elderly spaniel, a small routine that I have kept up through exam seasons and which has made me reliable about commitments that matter to someone else. I play in the school chess club and organised a lunchtime ladder competition last year, keeping the results table and persuading some younger players to join. Chess has given me something useful for language learning: a tolerance for slow progress and pattern recognition built through repetition. I am looking forward to the intensive start of a degree in two languages from scratch, and to a year abroad where I can finally use them in everyday life.