Design and Digital Media MSc postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Every Tuesday morning at the branch library where I work as a library assistant, the same few people stand in front of the self-service kiosk and wait for me. The screen asks them to 'place items in the designated zone', and the zone is a grey shelf that looks exactly like every other grey shelf. Over two years I have walked dozens of people through that screen, and I have started keeping a notebook of the moments where they hesitate. It now runs to several pages, and it is the main reason I want to study design and digital media at postgraduate level. I can describe what goes wrong with an interface. I want to learn how to build something better and test whether it works.

My degree was in English Literature, which may seem a distant starting point, but it trained me to pay close attention to how structure shapes meaning. For my final-year project I took an optional route that allowed a creative piece with a critical commentary. I wrote an interactive story in Twine about the last week of a rural bus route, where the reader chooses which passengers to follow. Writing the branching paths taught me that a reader's sense of freedom depends heavily on what the author chooses to hide. I added a small amount of CSS and JavaScript to make earlier choices fade on screen rather than disappear, which was my first experience of a technical decision changing how a piece felt. I asked twelve friends to play it and compared where they stopped reading. Most abandoned it at a single long passage, which I then split into shorter scenes. The commentary received a strong mark, but what I valued most was watching real people use something I had made.

Since graduating I have tried to build the skills my degree did not give me. I completed free online courses in HTML, CSS and introductory Python, and I have been working through Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things. His distinction between affordances and signifiers gave me a vocabulary for the kiosk problem: the shelf affords placing books on it, but nothing signals that it should be used. I mocked up an alternative start screen in Figma with a photograph of the shelf and a single instruction, and my manager allowed me to print it as a laminated guide beside the machine. It is a modest fix, but fewer people now call me over at the first step.

I also run a weekly digital help drop-in, mostly for older residents filling in council forms or setting up email. This has made me wary of assuming that good design means fewer words or more minimal screens. Several regulars find icons without labels harder, not easier. I would like to explore that tension properly, with methods more rigorous than my notebook.

Outside work I sing alto in a community choir, and for the past year I have produced our concert programmes and managed a simple website. Balancing what the conductor wants to say with what an audience will actually read in a draughty church hall has been useful, unglamorous practice in layout and editing.

I am drawn to a course that combines critical thinking about digital culture with practical making, because I do not want to choose between them. I expect the technical side to stretch me most, particularly programming for interactive work, and I am ready to put in sustained effort there. What I bring is a habit of close observation, experience of explaining technology to people who find it frustrating, and a background in narrative that I think matters for how people move through digital spaces. In the longer term I hope to work on public-facing services, such as libraries, transport or local government, where clear design decides whether someone can do what they came to do.