Brazilian studies personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

Two years ago I signed up for a beginners' Portuguese class at my local adult education centre, mostly because the Spanish group was full. What kept me there was the reading: our tutor, who grew up in Belo Horizonte, handed out newspaper columns and song lyrics alongside the grammar exercises, and I started noticing how often the same arguments came up in different forms. Who counts as the owner of land. Whose version of the past gets taught in schools. How a country with enormous cities and enormous forests argues with itself about what development should mean. I wanted to understand those arguments properly rather than through headlines about the Amazon that appear for a fortnight and then vanish. Brazilian studies attracts me because it does not separate the language from the history, the politics or the cultural production. Reading Gilberto Freyre in translation, and then reading criticism of his account of racial mixture, showed me how an influential interpretation of a society can shape national self-image for decades and still be contested. I would like to work on questions of race, citizenship and internal migration, and to read Brazilian authors and historians in Portuguese rather than waiting for translation. At thirty-three I am not making a casual choice. I have spent a decade in work I was competent at and reasonably content in, and I have come to the conclusion that I would rather spend the next decades doing something that uses reading, languages and argument. This is the subject I keep returning to when nobody is asking me to.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

I left school after GCSEs and went straight into retail, so returning to formal study meant starting again with the habits of it. I am currently completing an Access to Higher Education Diploma in Humanities and Social Sciences at my local college, attending two evenings a week and studying at home around shifts. The history units have been the most useful preparation: I wrote an extended assignment on nineteenth-century abolition movements which required me to compare sources that disagreed, and I learned to stop treating a textbook summary as the final word. A sociology unit on migration introduced me to concepts of urbanisation that I later recognised in reading about the growth of São Paulo, and that overlap convinced me an area studies degree would suit how my mind works. Alongside the Diploma I have continued Portuguese, moving from the beginners' group into an intermediate class, and I now read short news pieces without constant recourse to a dictionary, though speaking remains the harder part. I have also been working through a general history of Brazil and Machado de Assis's Dom Casmurro in a bilingual edition, which was slow but showed me how much I can manage with patience. My study skills tutor helped me learn to reference properly and to plan essays rather than write them in one anxious sitting. I know an undergraduate workload will be heavier than an Access course, but I have already reorganised my life around study and found that I like it.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

For the past six years I have coordinated stock and ordering for four branches of a garden centre chain. The job involves forecasting from patchy data, negotiating with suppliers who all have their own version of what was agreed, and explaining to colleagues why a delivery has not arrived. It taught me to be sceptical about neat figures, to keep records I can defend, and to write clearly to people who have no time to read. I also handled the branches' seasonal stocktakes, which meant long days of checking discrepancies until the numbers made sense. That patience for detail is what I will bring to language learning and to archival reading. Before that I worked on shop floors, which is where I got used to talking to strangers all day. I train twice a week with a capoeira group run from a community hall. It is an amateur set-up and I am a middling student, but the group's Brazilian teacher explains the songs we sing and where the movements came from, and that has given me a small practical foothold in Portuguese pronunciation and in one tradition's history of resistance and adaptation. I try to read around it rather than assume the version I am told is complete. On Saturday mornings I volunteer at a food co-operative, weighing out bulk orders and taking payments. Several regulars are Portuguese-speaking, including a family from Recife, and short conversations there have done more for my confidence than any classroom drill. I enjoy talking with people about where they are from without turning them into a case study. Outside this I garden, badly but persistently, and I am slowly learning to cook feijoada for a household that does not agree on how much salt is acceptable. I am applying now because I have tested my interest over two years of evening classes and it has grown rather than faded.

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