Economics and Statistics MA (Hons) personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

Every Saturday at the café where I work, the owner asks me how many scones to bake for Sunday. For months the answer was a guess: twenty-four, unless it looked sunny. Last spring I started noting Sunday sales, the forecast and whether the rugby club next door had a home match. After ten weeks a pattern appeared, but so did a problem. Sunny days and home matches often fell together, so I could not tell which was driving sales. That question, how to separate two causes that move together, is why I want to study economics and statistics together. Economics suggests why people might behave in a certain way. Statistics tells me how far the data can support that explanation. In Tim Harford's How to Make the World Add Up I recognised my scone problem in his insistence on asking what a number actually measures before arguing about it. David Spiegelhalter's The Art of Statistics introduced me to the PPDAC cycle, and I realised my notebook had skipped the planning stage entirely. I want a degree that trains me to plan properly and to apply that to questions about prices, wages and policy, where the stakes are higher than leftover baking.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

I study Maths, Further Maths, Economics and Biology at A level. In Further Maths statistics, the chi-squared test for independence gave me a tool for the café data. I grouped Sundays by weather and by match day and tested each against sales categories. With so few weeks the expected frequencies were too small for the test to be reliable, which taught me as much as a clear result would have. Economics has given me the language for what I was seeing. Our unit on price elasticity made me wonder whether the café's 20p price rise in January changed demand. My teacher pointed out that one price change with no comparison group says little, which led me to read about difference-in-differences. I do not yet have the mathematics to use it properly, but I understand the logic of comparing changes rather than levels. Biology is less directly related, but designing practicals with controlled variables has made me careful about what a result can claim. For my EPQ I am comparing the t-test and the Mann-Whitney U test on small samples from skewed data, using simulations I wrote in Python to count how often each wrongly rejects a true null hypothesis. I want to understand when a comparison supports an economic explanation and when the available data simply cannot separate competing causes.

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

I have worked at the café for two years, mostly washing up and serving. Since last summer I have also done the weekly stock order on Saturdays, checking what has run low, allowing for local events and staying within a budget the owner sets. Wasted baking has fallen since I started keeping records, though I cannot claim my spreadsheet is the only reason, as the owner also cut the range. I play cornet in a community brass band that rehearses on Tuesday evenings and plays at fêtes in summer. Last year the treasurer and I worked together to set raffle ticket prices for the Christmas concert. We looked at three years of past sales and agreed on a five-ticket bundle. The raffle raised slightly more than the year before, but attendance was also higher, so I would not overstate our part. I also walk my neighbour's dog twice a week while she recovers from a hip operation, which has made me reliable about fitting commitments around schoolwork. Running is my way to switch off, since the only number involved is the time on my watch. I hope to bring the same patience with untidy, real data to my degree.