Interactive Media Technology postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

A boy of about seven held the tablet against the glass case and kept tapping the painted signal box, not the button labelled 'Signals'. He was right and my interface was wrong. That afternoon, during a test session for my final-year project at a small transport museum, persuaded me that I want to study interactive media at postgraduate level. I have spent my degree learning to make software work, and now I want to understand much more rigorously how people expect it to work.

My BSc in Computer Science gave me a solid technical base: data structures, graphics programming, human-computer interaction and a second-year group project building a web booking system. The HCI module was where I felt most engaged, partly because it asked questions that code alone could not answer. Reading Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things for that module, I was struck by his idea of signifiers, the cues that tell people where action is possible. At the time it seemed obvious. It only became useful when I watched a child ignore my carefully labelled buttons.

The project itself was a tablet app, built in Unity, that let visitors explore a large model railway layout the museum keeps behind glass. Users could select a train and see its route, or learn what a junction or signal did. I arranged three informal test sessions with the museum's volunteer coordinator, observing around twenty visitors and taking notes rather than recording anyone. After the first session I replaced the menu with direct touch on a photographic map of the layout, so that tapping the signal box itself opened its explanation. Older visitors found this easier too, which I had not predicted. I also learned the limits of my evaluation: my sample was small and self-selected, and I could describe what people did more confidently than why. I would like to learn proper methods for studying interaction, including how to design studies that tell me something reliable.

Alongside my degree I have worked at a bike-hire kiosk by the river for three summers and now part-time through the winter. It is not glamorous work, but it involves explaining the same docking machine dozens of times a day, and I have become interested in where people's confusion repeats. Most customers miss the same flashing light. I suggested to my manager that we tape a printed arrow beside it, and the queue at busy times did seem to move faster, though I never measured it. Small as it was, it made me think about physical and digital interfaces as one problem.

On Saturday mornings I coach a junior chess group at the local library. Teaching eight-year-olds has nothing to do with software, yet it has made me better at noticing when an explanation is not landing and trying a different route, such as moving the pieces myself instead of describing the move. I enjoy this work for its own sake, and it keeps me patient.

At postgraduate level I want to deepen my understanding of interaction design, sound and visual media, and the evaluation of interactive systems. I am particularly curious about tangible and mixed-reality interfaces, where the boundary between object and screen blurs, as it did at that glass case. I would bring reliable programming skills, experience of building something used by real members of the public, and a habit of watching carefully before assuming I know the answer. In the longer term I would like to work on interactive installations for museums or public spaces, where users arrive without instructions and the design must do the explaining.