African American studies personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

I began playing double bass two years ago because my college jazz band needed one, and I stayed because of the questions the music kept raising. Learning walking bass lines on standards led me to ask where the twelve-bar form came from, and why so much of the repertoire we play was written by musicians who could not stay in the hotels they performed in. Amiri Baraka's Blues People gave me a framework I had not expected: an argument that musical change tracks social change, and that the blues and jazz can be read as evidence about African American life rather than only as entertainment. I did not agree with everything in it, and I liked that I could tell where I disagreed. That book sent me to others, and reading W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk was the point at which a hobby became an academic interest. His account of double consciousness, of seeing oneself through the eyes of a society that disparages you, was the first piece of writing that made me understand how a concept can organise a whole field of study. I want to study African American studies because the subject brings together the things I already do separately. In History I work with sources and argue about causation; in English Literature I read closely; in Sociology I use concepts like structure and agency. A degree that treats literature, history, music, politics and religion as parts of one enquiry seems to me the honest way to approach a subject where so much evidence survives in forms other than official documents. I am particularly drawn to the twentieth century: the Great Migration, the long argument between different strategies for civil rights, and the cultural production that accompanied both.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My A-levels have given me the habits I will need. In History I study nineteenth-century America alongside a British paper, and my coursework compares how two historians explain the failure of Reconstruction to secure lasting political rights in the South. Working out why they reached different conclusions from overlapping evidence taught me to read footnotes properly and to notice when a strong phrase is doing the work that evidence should do. English Literature has trained me in close reading, which I have used on texts outside the syllabus: I spent a long time on the opening chapters of Frederick Douglass's Narrative, looking at how he uses withheld information, such as not knowing his own age, to make a structural argument about slavery rather than only an emotional one. Reading Toni Morrison's Beloved on my own afterwards was difficult and worth it, especially the way memory is presented as something that intrudes rather than something recalled at will. Sociology has been useful in a different way, giving me vocabulary for institutions and inequality and forcing me to think about how researchers know what they claim to know. I also took an extended reading project in college, for which I read Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns and wrote about her decision to build a large historical account around three individual journeys, and what that method captures and what it leaves out. Outside the syllabus I follow a few history podcasts and have started reading about African American religious history, which I know very little about yet.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

One Saturday a month I help my aunt run her secondhand book and record stall at a market in Wolverhampton. I set up, price stock, and increasingly do the research, since I am the one who will sit with a box of soul and gospel records and look up labels, pressings and dates. It has taught me patience with small details and how quickly a claim falls apart if you have not checked it. Talking to customers has been unexpectedly good practice for explaining things clearly: a man who had bought records in the seventies told me more about British soul clubs in an hour than I had found anywhere, and it made me think about who keeps cultural history and where it is stored. I also list stock online for her, which involves writing accurate descriptions without overselling. During term I volunteer at a homework club for Year 8 and 9 students, mostly helping with reading and written work. Getting a thirteen-year-old to explain what a paragraph is actually saying has sharpened my own explanations, and I have learned to ask questions rather than supply answers. On Saturdays in the summer I work at a garden centre, which is ordinary work involving early starts, stock rotation and customers who want advice I sometimes have to go and find. It has made me reliable and reasonably unflappable. My double bass playing continues with the college band, including two concerts a year and rehearsals I organise transport for. Between them, these commitments have taught me to manage time across a week and to keep reading seriously alongside paid work, which I expect to continue at university.

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