American studies personal statement example

Personal statement example

Our school jazz band spent most of last term rehearsing an arrangement of Gershwin's "Summertime", and somewhere between the third and fourth run-through I started wondering why a song written by a white New Yorker for an opera set in a Black community in South Carolina had become a standard that almost every jazz musician records. That question sent me to the library, where I found that Porgy and Bess has been argued over since its first production, praised for its music and criticised for how it represents the people it portrays. I did not reach a neat answer, but I realised that the thing I enjoy most is following one object, a song, a map or a novel, outwards into the arguments a country has with itself. American studies seems to be the subject built around exactly that habit.

My A level courses have given me different tools for it. In History I studied the civil rights movement, and my coursework essay asked how far the Montgomery bus boycott depended on local church networks rather than national leadership. Working through primary sources taught me to notice who was doing the organising when the photographs showed only a few famous faces. In English Literature, reading The Great Gatsby alongside Of Mice and Men made me think about how differently Fitzgerald and Steinbeck treat movement: Gatsby's reinvention depends on leaving the Midwest behind, while George and Lennie travel only to find another place where they cannot settle. Geography added something I had not expected, a way of reading landscapes, settlement patterns and transport routes as evidence in their own right.

Those interests came together in my Extended Project. I looked at road atlases and promotional leaflets for Route 66 from the 1930s, using digitised copies available online, and compared how they described small towns with the picture of the same road in The Grapes of Wrath. The atlases presented petrol stations, motor courts and scenic stops for travellers with money to spend, whereas Steinbeck's migrants experience the road as somewhere they are watched and moved on. My conclusion was modest: the same route was being sold as leisure to one audience while serving as a route of displacement for another. The project taught me how to manage a long piece of work, keep proper records of sources and accept that some questions need more evidence than a school project can gather. I would like to learn how to approach material like this with the methods of more than one discipline.

On Saturdays I work on the tills at a garden centre. It is not connected to my subject, but it has made me more confident talking to strangers, and I have been trusted to train two newer staff members on the till system and on handling refunds calmly during the spring rush. Balancing shifts with coursework has also made me organised about deadlines in a way I was not at sixteen.

Playing bass in the jazz band remains the part of my week I look forward to most. Holding the rhythm steady while others improvise requires listening closely rather than leading, and I think that is a fair description of how I like to study too: paying attention to the structure underneath the louder parts. Music has also kept leading me back to American history, from the movement of musicians north during the Great Migration to the way records carried regional styles across the country.

I want to study American studies because it would let me keep asking the kind of question "Summertime" raised, about who makes a culture, who is represented in it and who gets to tell the story, with the time and guidance to answer it far more thoroughly than I have managed so far.