Business information systems personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

The thing that pulled me towards business information systems was noticing how often an organisation's real problem is not the work itself but the way information moves around it. At the supermarket where I work weekends, stock counts are recorded on a handheld scanner, but gaps still appear because staff scan at the end of a shift rather than as they go, so the figures on the system and the figures on the shelf drift apart. Nobody is being careless; the process simply does not match how people actually work. I find that gap genuinely interesting, and it sits between two subjects I already enjoy: the technical side of building systems, and the business side of understanding why an organisation behaves as it does.

I want a degree that treats those two things as one problem rather than two. My Computer Science A level has taught me to think in terms of data structures, normalisation and queries; my Business A level has taught me to think about stakeholders, costs and the resistance that any change meets. What I lack is the middle ground: how requirements are actually gathered from people who are busy and sceptical, how a system is evaluated once it is live, and how decisions about suppliers and data are made when budgets are tight. Reading about enterprise resource planning made me realise how much of the difficulty is organisational rather than technical, and how often the clean diagram bears little resemblance to the working day it describes.

In the longer term I would like to work as a business analyst or in systems implementation, sitting between technical teams and the people who have to use what they build. I am drawn to that translating role because I am reasonably good at asking plain questions and not pretending to understand an answer I have not followed.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My A levels have fitted together more usefully than I expected. In Computer Science I have worked in Python and SQL, and the database unit was the point at which the course clicked for me. Designing tables, thinking carefully about primary keys and reducing duplication felt less like abstract theory than like tidying up a problem I had already met at work, where the same product can appear under two slightly different names.

Mathematics has been the harder subject and the one I have had to be most disciplined about. Statistics has been the most directly relevant part: sampling, probability and interpreting results carefully have made me more cautious about drawing conclusions from small amounts of data. I also expect the algebra and logic to matter when I meet formal modelling and optimisation at degree level, so I have kept working at the topics I find least natural rather than avoiding them.

Business has given me the vocabulary for the organisational half of the subject. For my coursework I analysed a regional bakery chain, looking at its cost structure and how it responded to rising ingredient prices. Writing it taught me to separate what the evidence showed from what I assumed, and to be specific about who inside a business would have to act on a recommendation. I enjoyed the section on operations and quality management most, particularly the idea that measuring the wrong thing can make performance worse.

Outside the syllabus I have read parts of The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt, which uses a novel to explain bottlenecks and throughput, and I follow write-ups of public sector IT projects because the published reviews are unusually frank about why systems fail. They tend to point at unclear requirements and poor communication rather than bad code, which is much of the reason I want to study this particular degree.

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

For the past fourteen months I have worked Saturdays and Sunday mornings at a supermarket, mainly on checkouts but also replenishing the chilled aisles. It is ordinary work, but it has taught me a great deal about systems in use: how staff develop workarounds when a process is slow, how price errors are escalated, and how much depends on one supervisor knowing where everything is. I have become the person colleagues ask when the self-service terminals stop accepting cash, mostly because I paid attention during training and wrote the fault codes in a notebook.

My main independent project has been for my uncle's convenience shop. He was tracking stock and supplier orders on paper, and reordering from memory. I built him a spreadsheet first, then rebuilt it as a small Access database with tables for products, suppliers and deliveries, and forms simple enough that he would actually use them. The technical part was not the hard part. Getting the design right meant sitting with him for an evening and writing down how he really ordered, which was by walking the aisles on a Tuesday, not by looking at numbers. I added a low-stock report that matched that habit rather than trying to replace it. It has been running for about five months; he uses the reordering report and mostly ignores the sales summary, which was a fair lesson in building features nobody asked for.

At college I help at the weekly maths support session for Year 12 students, explaining statistics topics I had struggled with myself the year before. Breaking something down for someone who is frustrated has improved how I explain technical ideas, and I have learned to check understanding instead of assuming it.

I also play for a local five-a-side team that I help organise, which in practice means chasing subs, booking pitches and keeping a squad list current. It is small-scale coordination, but it has made me reliable with deadlines and comfortable following up with people who have not replied. Between the job, the shop project and college, I have had to plan my weeks carefully, and I am confident that I can manage the independent workload of a degree that mixes technical and written assessment.

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