American studies postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Two summers ago I paid three pounds at a car boot sale for a battered state guide from the American Guide Series, the books produced by the Federal Writers' Project in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Someone had pencilled mileages in the margins of the motor tours, and one town had been firmly crossed out. I never found out why, but the book raised a question I am still working on: what happens when a government pays unemployed writers to describe their own country to people driving through it?

That question became my undergraduate dissertation in History and Politics. I compared the motor tour sections of two state guides, looking at how they presented small mining and mill towns to travellers. I was interested in the tension between the guides' practical purpose, telling a driver where to find fuel and what to look at, and their role as a New Deal portrait of the nation. I found that the tours often moved quickly past labour disputes while lingering on scenery and pioneer history, though the treatment varied between volumes and sometimes within a single chapter. I could only work from published texts and digitised material, so my conclusions were limited; I could say what the guides printed, but not how individual writers negotiated with editors. That gap is one reason I want to study further, ideally with access to archival sources and to methods from literary and cultural studies that my degree only touched on.

My other coursework gave me useful grounding. A second-year module on the United States after 1945 introduced me to debates about suburbanisation and highway building, and reading Lizabeth Cohen's A Consumers' Republic made me think about how citizenship and shopping became tangled together in the post-war period. I also took a political theory option, which taught me to read carefully for assumptions an author does not state. I would like to bring these strands together, combining close reading of popular texts with attention to policy and infrastructure.

Since graduating I have worked full-time in the ticket office of a regional coach station. It is an ordinary job, but it has sharpened skills I expect to use. I deal with timetable changes, refunds and passengers who are anxious about missing connections, and I have learned to explain complicated information clearly and calmly. I also helped my supervisor redesign the printed guide to onward connections we hand out at the counter, which made me notice how much a short document decides on the reader's behalf about what matters. I am aware that this is partly why the Guide Series still interests me.

On Tuesday evenings I help at an English conversation group in our town library. I prepare simple topics, such as reading a bus timetable or a council letter, and keep conversations moving so that quieter members get a turn. It has nothing to do with American history, but it has made me more patient and better at listening for what someone is actually asking.

Outside work I cycle long distances, usually planning routes along old roads and railway lines. It is a hobby I enjoy for its own sake, though I confess I sometimes check what the older guidebooks said about places I pass.

At postgraduate level I hope to develop my interest in how Americans have been taught to see their own regions, whether through guidebooks, roadside attractions or government publications, and to consider whose communities were left out of those accounts. I am a careful, organised researcher who finishes what I start, and I have a full year of working life behind me that has made me more disciplined about time. I would welcome the chance to build on my dissertation with stronger methods and wider sources, and to test my early ideas against the work of others in the field.