Accountancy and Controlling postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Nobody at the bakery cooperative where I did my undergraduate thesis could tell me what a sourdough loaf actually cost to make. They knew the price of flour and the hourly wage, but the loaf spent eighteen hours proving, occupied oven space that could have baked three baguettes, and was shaped by the most experienced baker on the slowest part of the shift. The cooperative had priced it by adding a fixed percentage to ingredients, and it sold well. My thesis asked whether it was quietly losing money.

To answer that, I applied activity-based costing to the bakery's six main products. I spent several early mornings recording oven loads, proving times and labour on a clipboard, then grouped overheads into cost pools such as oven hours, shaping time and order handling. The result was less dramatic than I expected: sourdough was not unprofitable, but its margin was far thinner than the managers assumed, while the plain rolls they considered a loss leader were among the most profitable items per oven hour. The part I found most interesting came afterwards. When I presented the figures, the head baker challenged my allocation of cleaning time, and he was right that I had spread it too evenly. Revising the model with him made it more accurate and, more importantly, made the managers trust it. I came away convinced that controlling is as much about building figures people will act on as about calculating them.

That idea follows me into my part-time job. For the past eighteen months I have worked two days a week as a bookkeeping assistant at a small dental practice. I reconcile card payments against the appointment system, process supplier invoices and prepare the monthly figures the practice manager sends to the external accountant. It is routine work, but it has taught me how much of management information depends on unglamorous consistency. Earlier this year I noticed that laboratory fees for crowns were being booked partly as materials and partly as general expenses, which made the cost of restorative treatment look lower than it was. I suggested a single expense code and a simple monthly check, and the manager adopted it. It was a small change, but it meant that when the practice reviewed its treatment prices, it was comparing like with like.

Academically, my strongest results came in management accounting and financial statement analysis, and I enjoyed auditing more than I expected because it made me think about evidence and risk rather than arithmetic. I want postgraduate study to give me a firmer theoretical basis for questions my experience has raised but cannot answer: how performance measures shape behaviour, when budgets help coordination and when they encourage gaming, and how control systems should differ between a large organisation and a small one with ten staff. I have started reading about the balanced scorecard and about the critique that measures can become targets in their own right, and I would like to study these ideas rigorously rather than through summaries.

Outside work, I coach junior table tennis on Saturday mornings at a community sports hall, which mostly involves patience, scheduling and persuading twelve-year-olds that footwork matters. I also share responsibility for my family's allotment, where I keep an informal record of what we plant and harvest each year; it has made me notice how quickly people forget what last season actually looked like without a written record.

In the longer term I hope to work in controlling or advisory roles, possibly with smaller businesses that lack an in-house finance function. I am a careful, persistent worker who is comfortable having my numbers questioned, and I would welcome the challenge of an intensive programme that tests both my technical knowledge and my judgement.