Arts Management, Policy and Practice MA postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

The room-booking calendar at the community centre where I work is colour-coded. Blue is regular hirers, green is one-off parties, and yellow is anything artistic: a youth dance class, a watercolour group, a Thursday ukulele circle. When I started three years ago there was very little yellow. Today there is a good deal more, and it has taught me that cultural activity in a town depends on unglamorous things: an affordable room, a caretaker willing to lock up at ten, and someone keeping track of who has paid.

I handle bookings, invoicing and hirer enquiries for around twenty hours a week. Much of the work is routine, but it has given me a close view of how small arts groups operate. I helped the dance teacher apply for a reduced community rate by setting out her attendance and fees in a simple table the trustees could follow, and I reorganised the booking system so that regular groups were not bumped by more lucrative private parties at short notice. Neither change was dramatic, but both kept activities running that might otherwise have stopped.

My degree was in Music, and in my final year I wanted to understand the financial side of something I had grown up with. My dissertation looked at how five amateur brass bands in my county pay their way. I interviewed each band's secretary or treasurer and read their annual accounts, using the public records held by the Charity Commission where the bands were registered charities. Most relied on a mixture of member subscriptions, engagement fees from fêtes and remembrance services, and occasional small grants. What interested me most was how much depended on a single committed volunteer, and how vulnerable that made each band when that person stepped back. I do not claim the study proved anything beyond those five cases, but it gave me a habit of looking at accounts alongside the stories people tell about their organisations.

I am now treasurer of my own band, where I play second cornet. I prepare a yearly budget, chase subscriptions and, last year, wrote our first application to a local community fund for replacement music stands and a new set of marches. It was successful, and the process showed me how far grant language sits from the way volunteers talk about what they do. Translating between the two is a skill I want to develop properly.

On Saturdays I work in a music shop, mainly selling strings, reeds and beginner instruments. Conversations with parents about whether a child can afford to continue lessons have made me think about who gets to take part in music at all. Reading Culture is Bad for You by Orian Brook, Dave O'Brien and Mark Taylor sharpened this. Their account of inequality in cultural work and audiences put a framework around things I had seen informally, and made me curious about whether policy aimed at widening participation reaches groups as small as those on my calendar. I have also been reading about the arm's-length principle in British arts funding, and I want to understand better how decisions made at national level affect a volunteer-run band or a hall committee.

Postgraduate study would let me test my practical experience against policy and research, and to learn methods more rigorous than those I could apply as an undergraduate. I am particularly keen to study cultural policy, audience development and the management of voluntary and community organisations. In the longer term I would like to work in a regional arts development role, supporting the groups that fill the yellow squares. I bring organisation, careful financial habits and a realistic sense of how small arts groups survive, and I am ready to build on them.