Comparative and International Studies postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Last spring a man at the conversation club I help run asked me to read a letter from his landlord. It was in plain English, but it referred to a deposit protection scheme, a statutory notice period and a council complaints process, each of which assumed he already knew how British housing rules fitted together. Back home in Colombia he had rented through a cousin's arrangement with no paperwork at all. Explaining the letter took twenty minutes, and most of that time went on the institutions behind the words rather than the words themselves. That gap, between how a rule is written and how it is understood by people arriving from a different system, is a large part of why I want to study comparative and international politics at postgraduate level.

My undergraduate degree combined Politics and Spanish, including a year studying in Valencia. There I became interested in how similar policy problems produce different institutional answers. For my dissertation I compared public consultation on bus network redesigns in Valencia and in Leeds, the city where I grew up. I analysed consultation documents, council minutes and local press coverage, and interviewed four people, among them a residents' association secretary in each city. The Leeds process gathered more responses through online surveys, while the Valencia process relied more on neighbourhood associations with long-standing links to the city council. I argued that the format of consultation mattered less than whether established intermediary groups existed to carry residents' concerns into the process. My supervisor pushed me to be honest about the limits of four interviews, and writing that section taught me as much about research design as the rest of the project.

Reading for that dissertation led me to Arend Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy, and his distinction between majoritarian and consensus models gave me a vocabulary for differences I had noticed but could not name. I have since read Robert Putnam's Making Democracy Work, whose account of civic traditions in Italian regions helped me think about my residents' associations, though I am sceptical of how far long historical explanations can travel to other settings. I would like to develop the quantitative methods to test arguments like these more rigorously; my degree gave me one statistics module, and I have been working through an introductory R course in the evenings to build on it.

Since graduating I have worked as a call handler in a council housing repairs team. It is not a policy role, but it shows me daily how procedure meets real life: a tenant reporting damp is routed through priority categories, contractor contracts and inspection rules that nobody on the phone chose. I have become good at explaining these processes calmly and at recording cases accurately enough that the next colleague does not need to call back. I was recently asked to help train two new starters on the logging system, which I enjoyed more than I expected.

Outside work, I co-run the conversation club at a community centre on Wednesday evenings, preparing simple themed sessions on things like doctors' appointments or school letters. I also play chess at a local club, which has nothing to do with politics but has made me more patient about thinking several steps ahead.

I want a programme that will deepen my grounding in comparative institutions and give me stronger methodological training, so that questions I have approached through a small qualitative project can be investigated with more confidence. In the longer term I hope to work in policy research on public services and migration, where an understanding of how different systems shape ordinary encounters with the state would be genuinely useful.