DDM Economics and Economic Analysis postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Each Thursday I write the following week's staff rota for the café where I work as a shift supervisor, and each Thursday I face the same small problem: footfall depends on things I cannot see in advance. A sunny Saturday, a market in the square, or a delayed train can double or halve the queue. Over two years I have kept a simple spreadsheet of covers per hour against weather and local events, and it now predicts quiet mornings well enough that we schedule one fewer person on most Tuesdays. It is a modest tool, but building it made me want to understand properly how economists separate a genuine effect from the noise around it. That is why I am applying for postgraduate study in economics and economic analysis.

My undergraduate degree combined economics and statistics. I enjoyed intermediate microeconomics most when it moved from diagrams to formal models, and I found that working through consumer theory with Lagrangian methods made the intuition clearer rather than more abstract. In econometrics I learned panel data methods and instrumental variables. I also learned how easily an apparently clean regression can depend on an assumption nobody has tested, which turned out to be the most useful thing in the course.

My dissertation examined whether a regional bus fare cap, introduced in some local authority areas but not their neighbours, changed weekend footfall in town centres. I used publicly available footfall counts and a difference-in-differences design. The hardest part was the parallel trends assumption: before the cap, the treated towns were already recovering slightly faster after the pandemic. I plotted pre-treatment trends, added an event-study specification, and reported that my estimated increase was small and sensitive to the comparison group. My supervisor said the honest discussion of that sensitivity was the strongest section. I agreed, and I would now like the training to handle such problems with more sophisticated tools, such as synthetic control and the recent literature on staggered treatment timing.

Outside my degree I have read Angrist and Pischke's Mostly Harmless Econometrics. Its insistence on asking what experiment a regression is trying to imitate has shaped how I read empirical papers. I have also worked through parts of a graduate microeconomics textbook on my own, focusing on general equilibrium, because I recognised it as the gap between my undergraduate preparation and postgraduate expectations.

Work has taught me things that are not on any syllabus. Supervising a team of five on busy weekends means making quick decisions, explaining them calmly, and adjusting when a colleague is ill. I also handle the end-of-day cash reconciliation, which has made me careful with numbers that other people rely on.

Away from work I sing tenor in a community choir. Learning a part from a score on my own, then fitting it into a group, takes patience I did not have at first. Most weeks I also help my grandmother with her bills and council correspondence. Seeing how confusing the letters about her pension and energy support can be has made me interested in how policy design affects whether people actually take up what they are entitled to.

At postgraduate level I hope to develop rigorous foundations in microeconomic theory and econometrics, and then apply them to questions about local public services and transport, where the data are messy but the decisions matter to ordinary households. I would value studying among people from different countries and academic traditions, since many policy questions look different depending on where you start. I am realistic about the step up in mathematical demand. I have prepared by revising real analysis and matrix algebra this year, and I am ready for the workload that serious study requires.