Business Economics [MA(SocSci)] personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

For seven years I worked in the dispatch office of a wholesale bakery outside Paisley, and the number that interested me most was the one nobody wanted: returns. Many of our corner-shop customers bought bread on sale-or-return, so every unsold loaf came back on the van the next morning. At first I simply logged them. Gradually I began to wonder why the arrangement existed. The shops took almost no risk, so they had every reason to order generously and keep shelves full, while we carried the cost of waste. Yet our managers defended the deal because full shelves sold more bread overall. Both sides were acting sensibly, and the outcome still looked wasteful. When I later read about the newsvendor problem, a model for deciding how much perishable stock to order when demand is uncertain, it described what I had been watching, and it showed that the best quantity depends on who bears the cost of leftovers. That is why I want to study Business Economics rather than business or economics alone. I want to understand how firms set prices, share risk and write contracts, and to gain the quantitative tools to judge those decisions properly instead of relying on instinct and a spreadsheet I taught myself to build.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

I left school with modest grades and no Higher Maths, so returning to study has been deliberate. Two years ago I took Higher Maths at an evening class while working full time and achieved an A; the calculus and logarithms were new to me, but practising them on the bus to work made them routine. I am now on a part-time Access to Social Sciences course at my local college, with units in economics, statistics and politics. For my economics project I wrote about minimum unit pricing for alcohol in Scotland, explaining how a price floor differs from a tax, particularly in who keeps the extra money, and why the policy was aimed at cheap, strong drinks rather than drinks in general. Statistics has been the unit I enjoy most, especially seeing why a small sample can mislead. Alongside the course I have read The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford, whose account of how coffee shops price different customers made me look again at our wholesale price list, and Ha-Joon Chang's 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, which I found useful precisely because it argues with the textbook view. I have also worked through free online introductory modules on microeconomics to get used to reading graphs and formal arguments.

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

My job involved planning the next day's van routes, matching orders to drivers and dealing with the problems that arrive at five in the morning, such as a driver off sick or a road closure. It taught me to make decisions quickly with incomplete information and to explain them clearly to drivers who had their own views about the best route. Over my last two years I built a spreadsheet recording returns by shop and day of the week. It showed that a handful of shops consistently sent back far more than the rest, often on Mondays. I took this to the sales manager, and with the shopkeepers' agreement we trimmed their standing orders on those days. Returns from those shops fell, and nobody complained of empty shelves. It was a small change, but it convinced me that careful use of data can improve ordinary business decisions. Outside work, I help cook a Saturday lunch at a church hall that serves around sixty people. I do the shopping on a fixed budget, which means planning menus around what is cheap that week and guessing numbers without wasting food, a problem that felt familiar. Most weekends I go hillwalking with friends, and organising lifts and bothy stops has made me the group's reliable planner. I am used to balancing work, study and commitments, and I am ready to give full-time study my complete attention.