Advanced Finance and Economics (Honours) personal statement example

Personal statement example

Last spring the garden centre where I work on Saturdays received a new price list from its compost supplier, and the manager asked me to help relabel the bags. The wholesale cost had risen by roughly a tenth, yet our shelf price went up by less than that on the large bags and more on the small ones. When I asked why, she explained that customers compare the big bags with the supermarket down the road, while people buying a small bag for a window box rarely shop around. I had just met price elasticity of demand in my Economics lessons, and here it was being applied by someone who had never needed the term.

That conversation shaped how I approached my studies over the following year. In A-level Economics I have most enjoyed the parts where a model meets messy behaviour: why firms absorb some cost increases and pass others on, and why interest rate changes take time to reach household spending. Reading Tim Harford's The Undercover Economist helped here, particularly his discussion of how businesses try to separate price-sensitive customers from those willing to pay more. It made me notice the same logic in train fares and cinema tickets, and also made me want to understand the theory more rigorously than a popular book can offer.

That rigour is why Mathematics matters to me as much as Economics. I enjoy statistics most, and our unit on hypothesis testing changed how I read news reports about prices. For a small independent project, I asked the owner of a café my family uses whether I could look at her main ingredient costs. She shared monthly totals for milk, coffee beans and flour over two years, with nothing identifying her suppliers. I built a spreadsheet comparing her costs with the official consumer price index and found that her costs had risen faster than general inflation for most of that period, driven mainly by dairy. The analysis was simple, and I was careful not to claim more than twenty-four data points could show, but she used it to decide which menu items to review first. Seeing a modest piece of work prove useful to a real business was satisfying, and it showed me how much I still have to learn about forecasting and risk.

Geography has given me a different angle. Studying the economics of coastal towns made me think about how investment decisions depend on assumptions about the future, and how hard it is to price something like flood risk. I would like to understand how financial markets attempt this, and where they get it wrong.

Outside the classroom, my Saturday job has taught me plainer things. I handle the till, deal with deliveries and occasionally cover the stockroom alone, which requires checking invoices against what actually arrives. I have caught a few short deliveries, which my manager appreciated, but mostly the job has made me reliable and comfortable talking to customers of every kind. I play hockey for a local club, where I have been vice-captain of the under-18 side this season, organising lifts and keeping track of who is available. I also walk an elderly neighbour's dog most weekday evenings, which is less a responsibility than the most predictable hour of my day.

I want to study finance and economics together because the questions that interest me sit between them: how individuals and firms make decisions with limited information, and how those decisions add up across a whole economy. A demanding course with substantial mathematical content appeals to me because I want to test intuitions like the compost pricing against proper models and evidence. I am ready for the step up in difficulty, and I would bring the same steady, careful habits that have served me well at school and at work.