Ancient history and Mediterranean archaeology personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

My interest began with a job rather than a classroom. Working at a garden centre, I spent two summers helping customers choose olive trees, bay and rosemary, and repeating the same line about Mediterranean plants tolerating thin soil and dry summers. It made me curious about how people had actually farmed that landscape, and I started reading about Roman agriculture in the evenings. That led me to Greek and Roman history more widely, and then to archaeology, which I found I liked even more because it deals with people who left no writing at all: the ones who dug the terraces, fired the pots and loaded the ships. What holds my attention now is the tension between texts and material evidence. Reading Thucydides alongside an account of survey work in the Greek countryside showed me how differently the two kinds of source behave. A historian gives you argument, motive and a shaped narrative; a scatter of coarse-ware sherds in a ploughed field gives you distribution and date range and forces you to build the argument yourself. I want to be trained to do both properly, including the unglamorous parts, such as understanding how a chronology is actually constructed from stratigraphy and pottery typology rather than accepting dates as fixed. I am applying as a mature student because I have thought about this carefully rather than drifted towards it. I know what full-time work is like, and I know that I would rather spend three years reading inscriptions, learning Latin properly and handling material than continue a job I can do without thinking. A degree combining ancient history with Mediterranean archaeology suits me because I do not want to choose between the written and the excavated record.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

I am studying for an Access to Higher Education Diploma in Humanities at my local college, having left school at eighteen with A-levels in English, Geography and Business Studies. The Access course covers history, literature and academic skills, and it has been the part of the last few years I have most enjoyed. My history units have included the Roman Republic and nineteenth-century Britain, and I was pleased to find that the research and referencing skills transfer between them, even though the evidence available is completely different in scale. For my extended project I wrote about the evidence for slavery in the Roman household, using Pompeian house plans and funerary inscriptions alongside passages from Pliny's letters. The most useful lesson was how partial the surviving picture is: the inscriptions that commemorate freed slaves tell us about the minority who were freed and could afford stone. Alongside college I attend a beginners' Latin evening class in the town library. We are working through basic noun and verb forms and translating short adapted passages. Progress is slow, and case endings still catch me out, but I can now read simple dedicatory inscriptions with a dictionary, which felt like a genuine step. I have also been reading around the subject: Mary Beard's SPQR, which made me think about how Rome told stories about its own origins, and Michael Scott's writing on the ancient Mediterranean, which pushed me to stop treating Greece and Rome as two separate boxes. Studying again after years away has taught me to plan properly. I write assignments in drafts, use the college library rather than only searching online, and ask tutors for feedback early rather than at the end.

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

For the last four years I have worked as a supervisor in a supermarket bakery, having previously spent eight years in garden centres. The job involves early starts, ordering, stock rotation and training new staff, often while dealing with a queue. It has given me habits that matter for study: turning up reliably, keeping accurate records, and staying patient when something needs explaining for the third time. Training colleagues also taught me that you only really understand a process once you have to describe each step clearly, which is exactly how I now approach revising a topic. I currently volunteer twice a month with a community archaeology group. So far this has meant test-pitting in a village field, sieving spoil, filling in context sheets under supervision and drawing a section with a very experienced volunteer correcting my scale lines. I am a beginner and the finds have been unspectacular, mostly post-medieval pottery, clay pipe stems and brick, but I have learned how much care goes into recording before anything is interpreted. I also help at a small county museum, washing and labelling finds and occasionally repacking boxes for storage, which gave me an unexpectedly clear sense of how much of archaeology happens after the digging stops. Outside this, I am a member of a local walking group and help organise routes and lifts, and I look after my neighbour's dog when she is at hospital appointments. I cook a good deal and have become interested in older food traditions, which is a slightly roundabout route into questions about trade in oil, wine and grain. These commitments mean I am used to fitting demanding reading around other responsibilities, and I intend to keep working part-time while I study.

This example has 5,169 characters across the three answers. Use it for ideas and structure. Your own UCAS answers must fit within 4,000 characters in total, including spaces.

Review this personal statement

Latest reviews