Classical studies personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

What keeps pulling me back to the ancient world is how much of it survives in fragments, and how much argument those fragments can carry. Working on my EPQ about Roman domestic religion, I spent a long time with images of lararium shrines from Pompeii and with the short, practical prayers in Cato's On Agriculture. What struck me was the ordinariness: household gods honoured with a few cakes and some wine, alongside careful instructions about ploughing. It made me want to ask better questions about who actually did this religion day to day, and how far the evidence lets us answer. Latin has taught me to slow down. Translating Cicero, I noticed how much his sentences depend on delaying the verb until the audience is already committed to his framing, and that changed how I read his arguments rather than just his vocabulary. In English Literature I am used to close reading, but classical studies asks me to read texts against material evidence, which I find harder and more interesting. A pot sherd, a tombstone inscription and a satirical poem do not agree with each other, and learning how scholars handle that disagreement is what I want from a degree. I am also drawn to the range. I would like to study Greek tragedy and Athenian democracy properly, and to spend time on periods I know almost nothing about, such as Hellenistic kingship or late antiquity. Studying the ancient world alongside its reception seems important too: my interest began with a museum display that had clearly made choices about what to show and how to label it, and I would like to understand those choices better.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My A-levels in History, English Literature and Latin have given me complementary habits. History has been the most useful training in evidence. A unit on early modern rebellions required me to weigh chronicles, government records and later accounts, and my teacher's insistence on asking who produced a source and for whom has become automatic. I now apply it to ancient texts, where the gaps between author, audience and subject are usually much wider. Latin is where I have made the most visible progress. I began the A-level with only GCSE grammar and found the set text daunting, so I built a routine of translating twenty lines each evening and keeping a notebook of constructions I repeatedly got wrong, mostly indirect statement and ablative absolutes. My translation marks improved steadily over the year, and more importantly I can now read unseen prose with a sense of how the sentence is shaped before I reach for a dictionary. English Literature has sharpened how I write. Learning to make an argument about a poem in a limited number of words has made my History essays less descriptive and more structured. My EPQ pushed me furthest. I had to narrow a vague interest in Roman religion into a manageable question about household cult in Pompeii, find scholarship at a level I could actually use, and accept that some of my early ideas were not supportable by the evidence I had. I read Mary Beard's work on Pompeii and found her caution about how much the surviving houses can tell us genuinely useful in trimming my claims. Outside my timetable I have been teaching myself Ancient Greek from a beginners' textbook, working through the chapters in the mornings before college. I am at the stage of reading simplified passages rather than real authors, and I know my accidence is shaky, but I can now recognise verb endings and I have started to see why translators make the choices they do.

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

For the past year I have helped run a classics reading group at college with a friend from my Latin class. We meet fortnightly with six or seven people, most of whom do not study Latin, and read a short text in translation: Sappho's fragments, a Lucian dialogue, parts of Antigone. My job is choosing the extracts and writing three or four questions to start discussion. I have learned to pick shorter passages than I first want to, because a group reads more carefully when there is less to cover, and to leave space for people who read the text differently from me. Someone's reading of Creon as genuinely frightened rather than simply tyrannical changed my own view of the play. I also volunteer one Sunday a month at a local heritage railway museum, mostly helping visitors and tidying the display cases. It is not ancient history, but it has taught me a lot about how objects are presented to people with no background knowledge, and how much a label does. I have noticed that visitors ask about the people who used an object far more often than about its date, which I think about when I read archaeological interpretations. On Saturdays I work at a garden centre, on the tills and restocking. It is busy, repetitive work, and it has made me reliable about time and reasonably patient with people. Being paid has also let me buy the secondhand texts and dictionaries I use. At home I look after my younger brother two afternoons a week while my mother works, which means my study time is fixed rather than flexible; I plan my week on Sunday evenings and have got used to working in shorter, defined blocks. Beyond that I read fairly widely, including Robert Fagles's translation of the Odyssey, which I compared with a prose version to see what verse form adds and loses. I am looking forward to seminars where such comparisons are the starting point rather than something I do alone.

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