Communication studies postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Last spring, a question at the pub quiz I host each month produced no correct answers from any of the eleven teams. I had asked which river 'runs through' a particular city, meaning the one that flows through the centre. Most teams named a larger river that skirts its edge, and several argued afterwards, quite reasonably, that their answer also counted. The fault was in my wording, not their knowledge. Since then I have tested every question on a friend before quiz night. This small habit reflects what draws me to postgraduate study in communication: the gap between what someone means and what an audience actually takes from a message.

My undergraduate degree in Sociology gave me methods for studying that gap, though I only realised it in my final year. For my dissertation, I interviewed fourteen residents of two streets in my home town about the leaflets their council sent when fortnightly recycling collections changed. The council had used a colour-coded calendar, which I assumed would be clear. In practice, several older residents kept the previous year's calendar on the fridge and never noticed the new one. Two households with shared bins were unsure whose responsibility it was. Others trusted a neighbour's account more than the printed material. I coded the interviews thematically and argued that the leaflet worked as information but not as communication, because it ignored the routines and social networks through which people actually learned about the change. Reading Robert Entman's work on framing helped me to see that the council had framed the change as a matter of dates. Residents, meanwhile, understood it as a question of who to ask and whom to believe. The dissertation received a first-class mark, and it left me wanting to study institutional communication with stronger theoretical and methodological training.

For the past eighteen months I have worked in the billing team of a regional water company's call centre. Much of the work involves explaining bills to customers who are confused or frustrated, often because a letter has used terms such as 'assessed charge' without saying what they mean. I have become good at translating these explanations into plain language without sounding patronising. I now help newer colleagues with the most common queries. Last year I noticed that many calls followed one particular letter about meter readings. I compiled the questions customers asked most often and passed them to my team leader. Some of these were later used in a revised FAQ. This was a modest contribution, but it showed me how much repeated confusion can be traced back to a single document.

Outside work, I help two Polish-speaking neighbours, and occasionally their friends, make sense of letters from the GP surgery, the council and their landlord. My Polish is conversational rather than fluent, so I often need to check terms carefully. It has made me attentive to how official writing assumes a reader who already knows how the system works. That assumption shuts out many people, not only those reading in a second language.

At postgraduate level, I want to develop a more rigorous understanding of how organisations communicate with the public, particularly in health, utilities and local government. I am interested in combining qualitative work like my dissertation interviews with experimental and survey methods. I have only touched on these so far, through an introductory statistics course, and I am keen to strengthen them. I would like to examine whether changes to wording, layout or the choice of messenger affect what people understand and do. I bring practical experience of listening to confused audiences daily, a completed independent research project, and a habit of testing my own assumptions before others pay the price for them.