Corporate Governance LLM postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Most of the board minutes I file at work are two pages long, and most say very little. As a company secretarial assistant at a small accountancy practice, I prepare confirmation statements, update registers of members and file changes of directors at Companies House for around sixty client companies, nearly all owner-managed. Occasionally a client grows, takes on outside investors or appoints a non-executive director, and the minutes change. They begin to record dissent, conflicts of interest declared and decisions deferred for more information. I have become curious about what drives that shift: whether governance follows legal obligation, investor pressure or the simple discovery that a board with more than one voice needs rules. I want to study corporate governance at postgraduate level to answer that question properly rather than from the filing cabinet.

My LLB gave me the foundations. In company law I was most interested in directors' duties under the Companies Act 2006, particularly section 172, which requires directors to promote the success of the company for the benefit of its members while having regard to employees, suppliers, the community and the environment. In seminars we debated whether this enlightened shareholder value approach changes behaviour or merely changes the language of board papers. I found that question harder to settle than I expected, and it shaped my dissertation.

My dissertation examined how the comply-or-explain principle of the UK Corporate Governance Code operates in practice. I read the governance sections of annual reports from a sample of FTSE 250 companies over three years and categorised their explanations for departing from Code provisions, such as a chair who had been on the board too long or an audit committee lacking enough independent members. Many explanations were thoughtful and specific; others repeated near-identical wording year after year. I argued that the flexibility of the regime is a genuine strength, but that it depends on shareholders actually reading and challenging explanations, which the evidence I gathered could not show they do. My supervisor's main criticism was that my sample was small and my coding partly subjective, which was fair, and I would like to develop more rigorous methods for this kind of documentary analysis. I received a first for the dissertation.

Outside my degree, I have been treasurer of my local rowing club for two years. It is an unincorporated association with about ninety members, and much of the job is ordinary: chasing subscriptions, reconciling the bank account and preparing accounts for the annual general meeting. However, when the committee proposed borrowing to replace an ageing boat, I had to explain the risk to members who were wary of debt, and we redrafted the constitution so that borrowing above a set amount needs a general meeting vote. It was a small exercise, but it showed me how accountability arrangements reflect trust within an organisation, and how difficult it is to write rules that are neither paralysing nor toothless.

I have also been reading beyond my course. Adrian Cadbury's report of 1992 was more practical and less theoretical than I had assumed, and I was struck by how much of its reasoning about separating the roles of chair and chief executive still frames current debate. I have followed discussion of reforms to the audit regime in the UK with interest, since my job gives me a close view of how small companies experience regulatory change, often as a new form rather than a new principle.

At postgraduate level I hope to study comparative governance models, especially the contrast between shareholder-focused systems and those giving employees a formal role on boards, and the growing pressure on companies to report on environmental and social matters. In the longer term I would like to work in governance advisory or as a company secretary for a larger organisation. I bring careful legal training, practical familiarity with the administration that governance rests on, and a habit of asking whether a rule changes what people actually do.