Economic Development [MSc] postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

In my first month at the credit union where I work as a member services assistant, a woman came in with a jam jar of coins she had saved since January for her children's Christmas presents. She wanted to open an account but worried she would not be able to resist withdrawing the money. We set up a Christmas savings account that only releases funds in November, and she was relieved. The product was not sophisticated. It worked because it gave her a commitment she could not easily break. That small transaction pulled together questions I had first met in my degree, and it is a large part of why I want to study economic development at postgraduate level.

My undergraduate dissertation asked whether owning a mobile money account was associated with a greater reported ability to raise emergency funds within a month. I used the World Bank's Global Findex microdata for several sub-Saharan African countries and estimated probit models controlling for income quintile, education, age and gender. Mobile money ownership was positively associated with being able to find emergency funds, but the relationship weakened considerably once I accounted for whether respondents also held a formal bank account. I could not separate cause from selection with cross-sectional data, and my supervisor pushed me to say so plainly rather than overstating the result. The most valuable part of the project was learning where my data stopped being able to answer my question. I now want the training in panel methods and experimental design that would let me approach such questions more convincingly.

My reading has followed the same thread. Portfolios of the Poor by Collins, Morduch, Rutherford and Ruthven, built on year-long financial diaries, showed me how much effort low-income households spend managing irregular cash flow rather than just low income. Banerjee and Duflo's Poor Economics introduced me to randomised evaluations of microcredit and their generally modest effects on average household outcomes, which made me more sceptical of single solutions. I am interested in how savings, credit and insurance interact for households facing volatile income, and in how much depends on the design details that are easy to overlook in policy discussions.

The credit union has given me a grounded view of those details. I process loan applications for members with thin credit files, help people set up payroll savings, and record why members leave. I suggested we track how many new members had previously used doorstep lenders, and after three months the manager began including this figure in reports to the board. My role is administrative, and I do not claim it resembles development practice abroad, but I have seen how fees, opening hours and the attitude of whoever is behind the counter shape whether people use a financial service at all.

Outside work I referee under-twelves football on Saturday mornings. It has taught me to make quick decisions calmly in front of frustrated adults, and to explain them briefly. I also help my younger brother with his GCSE maths most evenings, which has made me better at breaking an idea into steps without hiding the hard part.

I am applying for a masters in economic development because I want rigorous training in growth theory, microeconometrics and policy evaluation, and the chance to study household finance in contexts very different from West Yorkshire. In the longer term I hope to work in evaluation for a research organisation or a public body, assessing whether financial inclusion programmes do what they promise. I bring sound quantitative foundations, honest habits with evidence and a practical sense of how ordinary people manage money. I would like to build on all three.