Anthropology for Global Development Practice MA postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

When a customer collects a repaired phone from the shop where I work, I ask them to check that everything has transferred properly. Almost nobody opens their photos first. Many open a money transfer app, a family WhatsApp group or a banking app they use to send money abroad. Over two years behind the counter I have helped people reinstall these, reset forgotten PINs and work out why a transfer to Ghana or Poland had stalled. It has made me curious about what development looks like from the receiving end. Questions of money, obligation and trust that I first met as abstractions at university turn up at my counter every week.

My degree in Geography gave me a grounding in political economy and urban change. The modules I enjoyed most dealt with how policies are received rather than designed. My dissertation looked at why one estate in my town had the lowest uptake of the council's food-waste caddy scheme. The council's explanation was a lack of awareness. Over six weeks I carried out doorstep interviews with thirty-one households and spent several evenings at the community centre. I found that most residents knew about the scheme. The obstacles were practical: no space on narrow balconies, caddies taken from shared bin stores, and a distrust of the council left over from a recent dispute about repairs. The work earned one of the higher marks in my cohort. More importantly, it taught me how much a short conversation on a doorstep can reveal that a survey would miss, and how carefully you have to write up what people tell you when they are unsure why you are asking.

After graduating I read more widely in anthropology, which I had only touched on through optional reading. James Ferguson's The Anti-Politics Machine changed how I think about my own project. His account of a development scheme in Lesotho shows how framing poverty as a technical problem can push its political causes out of view. The council's "awareness" explanation had done something similar on a much smaller scale. Tania Murray Li's The Will to Improve takes the argument further. Her work in Indonesia shows how experts render problems technical so that they can be acted on, and I found her attention to people's resistance and compromise especially useful. I would like to study how ethnographic methods can feed into practice without simply becoming another tool of that process.

My job has given me other skills, too. I explain technical problems to people with very different levels of confidence and English. When I'm not sure what has gone wrong, I say so. I also keep careful records, because customers rely on us to handle their data properly. Outside work I sing tenor in a community choir that rehearses in a church hall. I help organise our twice-yearly concerts, mostly by chasing ticket money and booking the room. Most weeks I also drive my uncle, who no longer drives, to the shops and his allotment. I enjoy these hours, and they have little to do with my studies, though I have learned a lot about patience from him.

I am applying for postgraduate study because I want to combine anthropological training with a practical understanding of how development organisations work. I am particularly interested in remittances and mobile money. In particular, I would like to explore how digital transfers change family obligations, and how projects that promote "financial inclusion" are experienced by the people they target. I would like to build my skills in research design, ethics and fieldwork. I also want to learn how to present findings in a form that practitioners can use. After the degree I hope to work in research or evaluation for a development organisation, starting at an entry-level role. I think I would be more useful there if I could ask better questions and listen carefully to the answers.