Bachelor of Arts and Commerce personal statement example

Personal statement example

Every Saturday at the garden centre where I work, one of my jobs is to wheel out the trolley of reduced plants: lavender that has finished flowering, herbs that have gone leggy, perennials whose labels have faded. When I started, I assumed the discount was simply the manager's guess. After a few months I noticed a pattern. Some plants sold within an hour at half price, while others sat untouched at a third of their original cost. Customers were not just buying a cheaper plant; they were judging whether it could recover. I began suggesting that we group the healthy-looking items together and add a handwritten note saying 'cut back and water, will flower next year'. The manager let me try it for a month, and the trolley cleared noticeably faster. It was a small change, but it made me realise that commerce depends as much on how people interpret things as on the numbers.

That interest in how people make sense of buying and selling is why I want to study arts and commerce together rather than choosing one. In History this year I chose an independent project on the high street in my town. Using old trade directories and photographs held at the local library, I traced what had occupied twelve shop units between the 1930s and today. Some changes were predictable, such as ironmongers giving way to mobile phone shops, but others surprised me. One unit had been a draper's, then a building society, then a charity shop, and each change seemed to follow wider shifts in how families spent and saved. I learned to be careful with my sources. Directories were sometimes a year or two out of date, so I cross-checked entries against dated photographs before drawing conclusions. My teacher said the strongest part of the project was that I explained what the evidence could not show as well as what it could.

Economics has given me tools for questions like these. Reading Tim Harford's The Undercover Economist helped me see everyday pricing, such as the different coffee sizes in a café, as deliberate choices about who pays what. In Statistics I have learned to handle data more honestly, which mattered when a classmate and I investigated how students travel to school. We designed a short questionnaire, collected responses from about eighty students across two year groups, and split the work so that I handled the analysis while she wrote up the findings. We found that cost was mentioned more often than journey time as the reason for not using the bus, and we presented this to the student council. Nothing changed immediately, but it was useful to work on something with a clear purpose and a fair division of tasks.

Outside school I ring bells at our parish church on Sunday mornings and practice nights. Change ringing is not related to business, but it has taught me patience. Learning a method means memorising a pattern and keeping my place while five other people do the same, and a mistake by one person is heard by everyone. I enjoy the steady progress of moving from simple methods to harder ones over several years.

I am drawn to a combined degree because I want to understand organisations and markets alongside the histories, cultures and ideas that shape them. I am particularly interested in how businesses respond to communities and how places change over time, and I would like to explore whether those interests lead towards marketing, local government or something I have not yet considered. I would bring a habit of noticing patterns, checking evidence and working steadily, whether that is on a trolley of tired plants or a pile of old directories.