Behavioural science postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Most of the calls I take at the council's waste services line on a Monday morning are about the same thing: a bin that was not collected because it was put out on the wrong day. The collection calendar is posted to every household each spring, and it is accurate. The problem is not missing information but how people use it. Many residents tell me they 'just go by what the neighbours do', which works until one neighbour gets it wrong and half a street follows. After a few months in the job I started keeping a tally of these calls. They clustered in the weeks after bank holidays, when collections shift by a day. That small observation is a good summary of why I want to study behavioural science at postgraduate level: I am interested in the gap between what people know and what they do, and in how carefully we can test ways of narrowing it.

My undergraduate degree in psychology gave me a grounding in research methods, cognition and social psychology. For my dissertation I ran an online survey experiment with 212 student participants. Each read one of three versions of an overdue library reminder: a neutral notice, one stating that most students return books on time, and one stressing that another student was waiting for the item. Participants rated how likely they would be to return the book that week. The 'someone is waiting' version produced higher stated intentions than the neutral one, but the descriptive norm version did not differ clearly from either. I was careful in my write-up not to overstate this. Stated intention is not behaviour, my sample was narrow, and I could not check whether anyone actually returned a book. Designing the materials so that the three versions differed in only one respect took longer than the analysis, and taught me how easily a wording change introduces a second, unintended difference.

Reading beyond my modules shaped how I think about the field. Thaler and Sunstein's Nudge introduced me to defaults and choice architecture, and Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow gave me a vocabulary for fast, intuitive judgement versus slower deliberation. I also read about the replication difficulties in psychology, including large multi-lab studies that struggled to reproduce the ego depletion effect. This made me more sceptical in a useful way. I want to learn not only which interventions have been proposed but how to judge evidence for them, including pre-registration, adequate sample sizes and field trials where outcomes are measured rather than reported.

My job has given me practical evidence of a different kind. Call handling follows a script, and I have seen how small changes to it affect how quickly a call is resolved. When I suggested that we ask callers for their postcode before their complaint, so the system could show their collection day immediately, my team leader trialled it for a fortnight. It shortened many calls, though I recognise that was an informal comparison rather than a study. The job has also taught me patience with frustrated people, which I expect to matter in any work that involves designing services for the public.

Outside work, I volunteer as a timekeeper at my local parkrun most Saturdays, which involves careful, repetitive accuracy under mild pressure, and I share an allotment plot with a friend. Neither is connected to behavioural science in any grand way, although watching how many people return the following week after their first run has made me curious about habit formation.

I am applying for a master's because I want more rigorous training in experimental design, statistics and the applied use of behavioural evidence, particularly in public services. I would like eventually to work in a local government or public sector insight team, where questions like the bank holiday bin problem could be tested properly rather than guessed at. I bring a solid methods background, honest habits with data and daily contact with the everyday behaviour I hope to understand better.