Applied ethics postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My undergraduate degree in philosophy gave me the tools to take an argument apart; my working week keeps reminding me that arguments have to be put back together for people who need a decision by Friday. I am applying for a master's in applied ethics because I want to study, in a sustained and disciplined way, the questions I currently meet in fragments.

At university I came to the subject through a second-year course on ethical theory, where I expected to find a clean contest between consequentialism and deontology and instead found how much work is done by the descriptions we give of situations. That interest shaped my final-year dissertation on consent and decision-making capacity, in which I argued that the standard capacity test, by focusing on the moment of a single decision, underdescribes people whose understanding varies over days rather than minutes. Writing it taught me to read legal and clinical material carefully rather than treating it as illustration, and it left me with questions I could not resolve in twelve thousand words: whether supported decision-making is better understood as respecting autonomy or as constructing it, and what follows for relatives who are asked to speak on someone's behalf. I also took a module on moral responsibility, and a short course on political philosophy that introduced me to Rawls; the contrast between principles designed for institutions and principles applied at a bedside is one I would like to think about properly.

Since graduating I have worked as a booking and records administrator at a busy GP surgery. The job is largely practical – appointments, referrals, correspondence, requests for notes – but it has given me a steady view of how ethical commitments are realised or quietly lost in procedure. Who gets the on-the-day appointments, how much a receptionist should ask before triaging a call, what confidentiality means when a spouse rings on someone's behalf: these are not abstract puzzles to the people involved. I have sat in on practice meetings where a policy on releasing records to third parties was rewritten, and noticed how often the disagreement was about facts and consequences rather than fundamental values, and how sometimes it genuinely was not.

Outside work I volunteer as a trained listener on a community advice line, taking calls about debt, housing and benefits and signposting callers to local services. The training emphasised not advising, which I initially found frustrating and now think is defensible: the boundary protects callers from confident amateurs, though I am still unsure how to weigh that against the help I could plainly have given on some calls. I also share the care of my younger brother, who has a learning disability, with my mother. Arranging his transport and attending his reviews has taught me more about paternalism than any seminar – in particular how easily a family's convenience is described as someone's best interests.

I hope to study medical and social care ethics in depth, alongside research ethics and the philosophical foundations of consent, and to write a dissertation on supported decision-making that takes both the philosophical literature and the practical guidance seriously. In the longer term I would like to work in an ethics support or policy role within health or social care, or in advocacy. I am aware that a master's will demand more independent reading and sharper writing than I managed as an undergraduate, and I have been preparing by reading current journal articles on capacity and by keeping a notebook of cases from my own work that I cannot settle.

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