Celtic studies personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

Welsh was the language of my grandparents' kitchen and of the hymns at family funerals, but it was not the language of my house. For years that felt like an ordinary fact rather than a question. It became a question when I started answering the phone at a builders' merchant in Swansea and noticed how many of our delivery addresses were descriptions: fields, slopes, wet ground, a crossing place, names that had been written down by someone who did not know what they meant. I began looking them up in the evenings, then enrolled in a Welsh class to stop guessing, and the class turned into six years of Tuesday nights. What draws me to Celtic studies is that it treats language, literature and place as one subject rather than three. Reading the Four Branches in Sioned Davies's translation of the Mabinogion, I was struck by how tightly the narratives are pinned to specific locations, and how much of the storytelling works through obligation, insult and compensation rather than through inner feeling. I want to be able to read that material in the original, and to understand the manuscript history that stands between a medieval scribe and the paperback I bought. I am also interested in the comparative side: the relationship between the Welsh and Irish traditions, the long afterlife of early material in later poetry, and the very different positions the modern languages occupy today. I am applying now, rather than at eighteen, because I have finally worked out what I actually want to spend my time on.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My Access to Higher Education Diploma in Humanities has been a proper reintroduction to academic work after more than a decade away from it. The history modules have been the most useful for this application: writing about the Anglo-Norman settlement of south Wales forced me to read chronicle sources against archaeological and place-name evidence, and to think about who was recording events and why. A literature module on lyric poetry taught me to slow down and argue from the text rather than from impressions, which is a habit I had lost. I also took a research skills unit, where I produced a short referenced project on the Welsh Sunday school as a vehicle for literacy; tracking down nineteenth-century denominational records in the local archive was slower and more rewarding than I expected. Alongside the diploma I have continued with formal Welsh classes and now read newspaper articles and short prose without constant recourse to a dictionary, though medieval orthography and mutations still catch me out. I have begun teaching myself the basics of Irish using a grammar and online recordings, mainly to see how the two languages relate, and I can now recognise structures even where I cannot yet produce them. My independent reading includes Barry Cunliffe's The Ancient Celts, which was a helpful corrective: it made me more careful about assuming that archaeological material, ancient ethnographic labels and language families all describe the same group of people.

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

Twelve years at the trade counter gave me skills I did not think of as academic at the time. I dealt with builders who wanted an answer immediately, which taught me to explain things clearly and to admit when I needed to check. I managed stock ordering and monthly account queries, so I am used to detailed records and to noticing when figures do not match. I also trained new staff, which made me realise I enjoy the moment when something finally makes sense to someone else. My current job as a part-time library assistant suits me better: I handle reservations and the local studies shelves, help people use the microfilm reader, and have learned a good deal about how catalogues and classification actually work, which will be useful when I am hunting down editions and secondary literature. Outside work I volunteer with a community history group recording gravestones in two chapel cemeteries before the lettering wears away further. It involves a lot of kneeling in long grass, careful transcription and arguments about whether a worn letter is an e or a c, and I have transcribed around eighty Welsh-language inscriptions, some in verse. I have also helped compile field names from old estate maps for the group's newsletter. I sing with a local male choir, which is where most of my Welsh pronunciation was quietly corrected, and I care for a neighbour's dog twice a week, which gets me out walking regardless of the weather. Studying full-time will be a change, but I have arranged my hours and my finances, and I am ready for it.

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