Applied Behavior Analysis, MS postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

For three weeks last spring I kept a tally on the back of my lanyard card. Every time a boy in the Year 4 class where I work as a teaching assistant got up to sharpen his pencil during written tasks, I made a mark and noted what had just been asked of him. The pattern was not subtle once it was written down: the trips clustered in the first two minutes after any instruction involving more than one step, and almost never happened during maths, where tasks were broken into numbered parts. With the class teacher's agreement we began giving him the first step on its own, then the rest. The sharpening did not vanish, but it fell enough that he started finishing his opening paragraph. That small exercise is the clearest reason I want to train formally in applied behaviour analysis: I could see that careful observation worked, and I could also see how much I was guessing.

My degree in psychology introduced me to behavioural principles mainly through learning theory modules, where operant conditioning sat alongside cognitive accounts rather than being treated as a practical discipline. My final-year dissertation brought it closer to practice. With permission from a local primary school and ethical approval from my department, I compared on-task behaviour in a small Year 3 reading group under two conditions: verbal praise alone, and praise paired with tokens exchanged for choosing the next group book. I used momentary time sampling at thirty-second intervals and alternated conditions across sessions. The results suggested tokens helped some children more than others, but with six pupils and four weeks I could not separate the effect of the tokens from novelty, and I said so in my discussion. Writing that limitations section taught me more about single-case design than any lecture, and it sent me to Cooper, Heron and Heward's Applied Behavior Analysis, where I first understood why reversal and multiple-baseline designs matter.

Since graduating I have worked full time as a teaching assistant, supporting children with a range of needs, including two pupils with autism diagnoses who have individual plans written by outside specialists. My role is to carry out parts of those plans, not to design them, and I have learned to value clear written procedures. When a plan says exactly what counts as a prompt and when to fade it, staff behave consistently and the child benefits; when it is vague, each adult does something slightly different. I have started keeping simple frequency records where teachers find them useful, and I have become comfortable discussing data with parents in plain language.

On Saturday mornings I help run a junior swimming session at my local leisure centre, a job I have held since university. It is not connected to my career plans in any formal way, but teaching a nervous seven-year-old to put her face in the water one stage at a time is shaping in practice, and it has made me patient with slow progress. I also bake bread most weekends, which has nothing to do with behaviour analysis except that I enjoy anything where small adjustments can be measured.

I am applying for postgraduate study because I want the supervised training, ethical grounding and design skills to move from following plans to building them responsibly. I am particularly keen to deepen my understanding of functional assessment, since my pencil-sharpening tally was really a crude attempt at one, and to learn how practitioners involve families and school staff so that interventions last beyond the clinician's visit. I also want to understand the debates about ABA within the autistic community, because I think practice should take criticism seriously rather than defensively. I bring steady classroom experience, a habit of recording before concluding, and a realistic sense of what I do not yet know.