Museum studies postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

In the second year of my degree I counted the words on every object label in two small town museums in south Wales. One museum averaged about forty words a label; the other rarely managed fifteen. That counting exercise became the starting point for my dissertation, and it is also the reason I want to study museums properly rather than simply visit them.

I graduated from Cardiff with a 2:1 in Archaeology and Geography. My dissertation asked how two local museums, with similar collections of mining tools, domestic objects and chapel material, described the same kinds of things to visitors. I photographed and transcribed labels, then coded them for whether they named a maker, a user, a place or a date. The longer labels were not always more informative: several spent their words on technical description and said nothing about who had held the object. The shorter ones sometimes did better by naming a family or a pit. I spoke briefly with a volunteer at each site, which taught me how much label writing depends on who is available, what the accession records actually say, and whether a case can be reopened at all. I learned to be careful about judging displays without understanding the constraints behind them.

Since graduating I have worked as a library assistant in a public library. Much of the job is ordinary: shelving, issuing, chasing overdue loans, helping people print forms. But it has given me a practical sense of how people use a public collection. I have watched a man spend three weeks working through local newspapers on microfilm to find his grandfather's name, and helped a group of primary school children choose books when half of them could not yet read the titles. I now run the library's small display table each month, choosing a theme, pulling stock and writing a short card. It is modest, but it has made me think about selection: what to leave out matters as much as what goes in.

For the past year I have also volunteered once a fortnight with a museum's handling collection, taking a trolley of objects into the galleries and letting visitors touch a flat iron, a miner's lamp or a clay pipe. My role is to look after the objects, follow the handling guidance and answer basic questions. I am not a curator and do not pretend to be, but the trolley has shown me something the labels could not. People ask about weight, smell and who used things far more often than about dates. That has sharpened my interest in how museums balance object care with access, and how interpretation can draw on the questions visitors bring.

My reading has followed these interests. Sharon Macdonald's writing on museums as places where identities are made helped me see my dissertation sites as more than storerooms with captions, and I have been reading about collections documentation standards to understand the records that sit behind every label. I would like postgraduate study to give me a firmer grounding in collections management, interpretation and the ethics of what museums hold, so that my practical observations rest on sound method.

Outside work I play cornet in a brass band, which involves a lot of patient rehearsal and turning up when it is cold, and I do my grandmother's weekly shopping and sort her post. Neither is glamorous, but both have made me reliable and organised, and the band has given me an affection for community heritage that is still played rather than displayed.

I hope to work eventually in a local or regional museum, where collections are close to the people they come from. I am ready to bring careful research habits, public-facing experience and a genuine curiosity about how objects and words meet in a gallery.