Applied Cultural Analysis postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

The bus company where I work as a customer service adviser sorts every complaint into one of fourteen codes. Code 3 is 'late running', and it covers most of what I log. After two years on the phones, I know it hides several different complaints. A student whose bus left early is angry about the timetable's honesty. A carer who missed a hospital appointment is angry about being responsible for someone else. An older man who rings most weeks about the same stop seems to want to talk about how the route changed after the old depot closed. The codes are useful for counting, but they flatten what passengers are actually telling us. I want to study applied cultural analysis because I would like to learn how to make that kind of understanding rigorous and usable for organisations, rather than leaving it as something advisers simply sense.

My degree in Social Anthropology gave me the starting tools. A first-year reading of Clifford Geertz's essay on thick description changed how I approached fieldwork. It made me see that the work is not only recording behaviour but interpreting the meanings people layer onto it. For my dissertation I spent eleven Sunday mornings at a car boot sale in a farmer's field outside my home town. I studied how sellers priced objects they had a personal connection to. I helped one family run their stall and kept fieldnotes in the car between rushes. I also recorded six longer interviews afterwards. Using the idea from Arjun Appadurai's edited volume The Social Life of Things that objects move in and out of being commodities, I argued that many sellers set prices to filter buyers rather than to make money. One woman priced her late husband's fishing reels high on purpose. She would drop the price for someone who asked how to use them. My supervisor's main criticism was that I had relied too heavily on one stall. That was fair, and it taught me to think about access and positioning from the start of a project.

Work has given me a different kind of evidence. Last year I offered to review six months of Code 3 complaints for the two rural routes with the most calls. My manager agreed, and I read around four hundred entries. I re-sorted them by what callers seemed to need rather than by the delay itself. I found that many callers mainly needed to know whether to wait, which the stop signs could not tell them. I presented this to the operations team. They added a printed note about the usual delay window at three stops, and calls from those stops have gone down since. It was a small change, but it showed me that careful interpretation can lead to practical decisions. It also showed me the limits of my methods. I had only text, no observation, and no way to hear from people who never rang.

Outside work, I score for my village cricket club on Saturdays. Scoring is mostly concentration and neat handwriting. It has also made me notice how a small community keeps its own records and argues about them over tea. I enjoy that for its own sake rather than as research.

From postgraduate study I want stronger training in qualitative methods beyond interviews and fieldnotes. I would like to work with visual and sensory approaches, and to learn how to design studies with organisations as partners. I am particularly interested in everyday infrastructure such as transport, markets and public services. These are places where formal categories meet people's ordinary routines. I am comfortable spending long hours listening to people, and I can write clearly for non-academic readers. I now want the theoretical depth and methodological discipline to do this work properly, and in the longer term to bring cultural analysis into how public services are planned.