Bachelor of Arts in Sport and Physical Culture Studies personal statement example

Personal statement example

At half past five on Saturday mornings a whistle sounds on our street in Tema, and about forty people in matching yellow T-shirts start jogging towards the main road. For years I heard it from bed. Last year I joined the keep-fit club. After a few weeks I began to wonder why some people kept coming, why others disappeared after a month, and why the singing mattered so much. Those questions are the reason I want to study sport and physical culture rather than only sport.

I decided to look properly. For six Saturdays I carried a small notebook in my pocket and, after each session, wrote down roughly how many people came, which age groups and how many were women, the route, the songs, and anything that changed the mood. The leader, a retired lorry driver everyone calls Captain, let me ask members a few questions while we stretched. I kept them simple: how did you start, and what keeps you coming?

The answers were not what I expected. Very few people mentioned weight or fitness first. A market trader said she came because it was the only hour of the week nobody asked her for anything. Two young men joined after a funeral where the club had marched and sung, and they wanted to belong to something that looked like that. On a rainy Saturday the numbers fell sharply, but the people who stayed were mostly the older members, who treated turning up as a duty to the group. I noticed that when Captain changed the route to avoid a busy junction, the stretch past the roadside kenkey sellers disappeared, and so did the waves and jokes that seemed to lift the pace. I can't prove anything from six weeks of one club. Still, the notebook showed me that exercise here is also ceremony, identity and neighbourliness, and that these things can be observed and described carefully.

My school subjects helped me think about this. In Physical Education I learned about the components of fitness and how training works, and I enjoyed the practical side, especially athletics, where I run the 400 metres for my house. History made me ask where things come from. When we studied the colonial period, I began wondering how football, drill and school sports days arrived and how they mixed with games that were already here. I would like to study that properly rather than guess.

At home I walk my twin sisters, who are nine, to school each morning. In the evenings they make me play ampe in the compound. They are faster than me and they know rules I have forgotten. Watching them argue about whose turn it is, I can see a whole system of counting, rhythm and fairness that nobody wrote down. It is one reason I think traditional games deserve the same attention as organised sport.

On weekday afternoons and holidays I sell phone credit and mobile money services at my uncle's kiosk. It is not related to sport, but it has made me reliable with money and records, and patient with people who are in a hurry or confused. Because I talk to many customers, I have learned to listen before answering, which helped when I was interviewing club members.

I am applying for this degree because I want to understand how people in Ghana use their bodies together: in clubs, schools, games, celebrations and work. I want to learn research methods that would let me do something like my notebook study with more care and more people, and to read what others have already discovered. Later, I would like to work with communities or schools on physical activity that fits how people actually live. I am curious and organised, and I am used to turning up at half past five.