Communication and information studies personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

My A-level in English Language taught me to look closely at how wording shapes a reader's response, and I found I wanted to ask bigger questions than a single text allows: who decides what information reaches people, in what form, and who is left out. Helping my grandmother set up video calls and read through her energy tariff letters showed me that a message can be technically accurate and still fail completely. She could not tell a genuine delivery text from a fraudulent one, not because she is careless but because both used the same friendly, urgent tone and the same shortened links. That sent me looking for reading rather than quick answers. Nicholas Carr's The Shallows made me consider how the medium itself shapes attention, while Sonia Livingstone's writing on media literacy helped me see digital skills as social and unevenly distributed rather than simply generational. I am drawn to communication and information studies because it treats these as researchable problems, combining audience research, the study of institutions and the practical craft of making things clear. I would like to study how organisations communicate with people who are not their easiest audience, and to learn the methods, content analysis, interviews and survey design, that let me test claims instead of guessing. Longer term I am interested in public communication work in local government or the charity sector, where the writing matters and so does knowing whether it worked.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

English Language is the closest thing my timetable offers to this degree. Analysing transcripts and written data has made me careful about evidence, and my coursework investigation compared how two supermarket loyalty apps addressed users through notifications, looking at imperatives, personalisation and the use of time pressure. I learned how much work a framework does, and how easy it is to over-read a small sample. Sociology has given me the vocabulary for structure and inequality, and the research methods unit is the part I enjoy most: I now think about sampling and researcher effects when I read survey results in the news, and I am more sceptical of headline percentages with no base figure attached. History has trained me to weigh sources against each other and to write an argument that acknowledges what complicates it; studying nineteenth-century reform and the growth of a mass press also showed me that anxieties about new media are far from new. Outside class I attend an extended project style reading group in college, where I presented on filter bubbles and pushed back on my own first draft after reading criticism of how strong the evidence for them actually is. I have also been teaching myself basic spreadsheet analysis and some HTML so that I can read and shape the platforms I am writing about, not only the words on them.

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

With two friends I make a short printed zine, four issues so far, covering music, local food and writing from students at our college. I do most of the layout and the editing, which means asking contributors difficult questions about clarity and cutting sentences I liked. We distribute copies in two cafes and a record shop, and after the second issue we changed the contents page and the type size because people told us they read it standing up. That was the first time I gathered feedback deliberately and acted on it. I volunteer on Wednesdays at my local community library, shelving and helping at a digital drop-in where visitors bring bus pass applications, GP registrations and printer problems. I have learned to explain one step at a time, to avoid jargon like browser and tab without checking, and to write things down for people to take home. Some of my rewritten instruction sheets are still pinned by the public computers. My Saturday job on the tills at a garden centre involves long queues and repeated questions, which has made me quicker at reading what someone actually needs rather than what they first ask for, and I helped redo a confusing sign about the plant guarantee. I also swim with a club two evenings a week, which keeps me organised around college deadlines. Together these have shown me that useful communication is patient, tested and rewritten, and I want to study it properly.

This example has 4,242 characters across the three answers. Use it for ideas and structure. Your own UCAS answers must fit within 4,000 characters in total, including spaces.

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