Applied and Professional Ethics MA postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Every prescription bag in the pharmacy where I work as a dispensing assistant is sealed and labelled with a name, an address and a date of birth, then filed alphabetically on shelves behind the counter. When a customer collects, I ask them to confirm their address, and I try to do it quietly. Most days this is routine. Occasionally a neighbour arrives to collect for someone else, or a parent asks after a medicine for their seventeen-year-old, and the routine becomes a small question about who is entitled to know what. I want to study applied and professional ethics because I have spent two years watching ordinary people handle those questions well, badly and inconsistently, and I would like to understand them more rigorously.

My degree in Philosophy and Sociology gave me two habits that I now think belong together. Philosophy taught me to separate an argument from the person making it and to test it against counterexamples. Sociology taught me to ask how rules actually operate in institutions, and who carries the cost when they fail. My dissertation, on consent and the sharing of patient information in general practice, tried to use both. I compared the idea of informed consent, as it is usually defended through respect for autonomy, with what consent looks like when it is given by not ticking an opt-out box. Drawing on Onora O'Neill's argument in Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics that consent is better understood as a way of preventing deception and coercion than as a full expression of individual choice, I argued that presumed consent can be defensible for some uses of data but not others, depending on whether patients could reasonably have foreseen the use. My supervisor's main criticism was that I relied too heavily on a single case, and a broader comparison is something I would like to attempt at postgraduate level.

Work has kept these questions concrete. Pharmacists, not assistants, make clinical decisions, and I am careful not to overstate my role. But I have seen how professional judgement sits alongside procedure. Standard operating procedures tell me what to check before handing over a controlled drug; they do not tell me how to respond when an elderly customer clearly wants to talk about her diagnosis in a queue of six people. I have learned to recognise when something belongs with the pharmacist, and I have become interested in why professions write codes the way they do: what is left to individual discretion, and whether that discretion is trusted or merely tolerated.

Outside work, I marshal most Saturdays at my local parkrun and play fiddle in a ceilidh band that does weddings and village halls. Neither is about ethics, though the band has taught me something about shared responsibility: when the caller misjudges a dance, the musicians adjust tempo without anyone stopping. I enjoy being part of something that works because people pay attention to each other.

Over the last year I have read beyond my degree to prepare. Bernard Williams's discussion of moral luck made me reconsider how we blame professionals for outcomes they could not fully control, and I have worked through introductory material on research ethics and on the ethics of artificial intelligence, an area where I feel my knowledge is still thin. I want a course that combines normative theory with sustained attention to particular professions, because my strongest work so far has come from holding a principle against a real practice and seeing where it bends.

In the longer term I am interested in roles in research governance or ethics committee administration, though I am open to doctoral study if the work leads there. For now, I want the time and structure to turn questions I meet at a pharmacy counter into arguments I can defend carefully.