Business and Economics MA (Hons) personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

A street of terraced houses where I can clean twenty customers' windows in a morning earns me more than a scattered estate where each house pays more. I learned this slowly. For six years I have cleaned windows for a living, first on my uncle's round and, since he retired, running it myself. The costly part of my day is the van moving between jobs, not the work itself. Proving that with a notebook of timings and a fuel log made me want to understand the reasoning behind such decisions rather than relying on instinct. Tim Harford's The Undercover Economist gave me language for what I had seen. His explanation of how coffee sellers near busy stations can charge more because of their location helped me see why I could hold prices on dense streets but struggled on outlying jobs. Ha-Joon Chang's Economics: The User's Guide was useful differently, showing that economists genuinely disagree about how markets behave. I want to study business and economics together because my questions sit across both: how a small firm prices and plans its time, and how wider forces such as fuel costs and interest rates shape the choices open to it.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

I left school at seventeen with average grades and no clear plan, so returning to study was a deliberate decision. For the past year I have been taking an Access to HE Diploma in Business and Social Science at my local college, attending two evenings a week after finishing my round. The units I have enjoyed most are introductory economics and statistics. Drawing supply and demand diagrams felt abstract at first, until I applied them to the cost-of-living period and could explain why some households cut regular services while others did not. For my research project I looked at why customers cancel recurring household services. I designed a short anonymous survey, shared through a local community noticeboard, and compared the responses with patterns in my own cancellations, recorded only as totals by month. The sample was small, and my tutor's feedback helped me write honestly about what it could and could not show, which taught me more than a neat conclusion would have done. Statistics has been my biggest challenge, so I work through extra exercises online at weekends. I now enjoy calculating a standard deviation and understanding what it tells me about spread.

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

Running the round has given me practical experience of small-business decisions. When I took over, most customers paid cash on the doorstep and records lived in my uncle's diary. I moved everyone I could to bank transfer, built a spreadsheet to track payments and visits, and cut the time I spent chasing money each month. When fuel prices rose sharply in 2022, I reorganised the route into fixed areas on set days and passed a handful of distant customers to another cleaner nearer them. It was hard to drop paying work, but my margins improved, and I could now explain the reasoning in terms of costs rather than gut feeling. I also learned to keep an eye on obligations such as VAT registration and to set money aside for tax rather than treating every payment as income. Outside work, I play cornet in a community brass band. Rehearsals every Wednesday have taught me patience, because a difficult piece improves bar by bar rather than all at once. Last year I offered to help the committee sell tickets for our winter concert, and set up a simple online booking form so we could see demand early and decide how many chairs to hire. Studying full-time will mean real changes to my income and routine, and I have planned for them. I am ready to put the same steady effort into a degree.