Development Economics and Policy MSc postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

A care worker rang me last spring because her payslip showed fewer hours than she had worked. The error was ours: a visit logged on the wrong rota. Correcting it took ten minutes, but she explained afterwards that the missing forty pounds had been meant for her mother in Nairobi, sent by phone the same evening she was paid. I had written my undergraduate dissertation on exactly that kind of transfer, and the conversation reminded me how much depends on small, regular sums arriving on time.

I studied Politics and Economics and graduated with a 2:1. My dissertation asked whether the spread of mobile money in Kenya had changed how households respond to sudden shocks such as illness or a failed harvest. I did not collect data myself. Instead I worked through published survey reports and the academic literature, particularly the research by William Jack and Tavneet Suri on M-Pesa and risk sharing, which found that households using mobile money were better able to smooth consumption after a shock. My contribution was modest: I compared their argument with qualitative accounts of how remittances create obligations between relatives, and I suggested that cheaper transfers may also raise expectations on migrants who send money home. My supervisor's main criticism was that I could describe these mechanisms but could not test them, and she was right. That gap is the clearest reason I want postgraduate training. I would like to learn to work with household panel data and to understand how researchers separate the effect of a technology from the characteristics of the people who adopt it first.

My undergraduate modules in econometrics gave me a foundation in regression and basic causal reasoning, and I achieved my highest marks in a development module where we discussed Banerjee and Duflo's Poor Economics. I found their emphasis on testing specific interventions persuasive, but I was equally interested in the criticism that randomised trials can struggle to say much about larger questions of state capacity or industrial policy. Since graduating I have kept reading on both sides, and I have taught myself R using free online courses, recreating simple tables from replication files that authors have made public.

My job as a payroll administrator for a home care agency is not glamorous, but it has taught me things that matter for applied economics. Much of my work involves reconciling records from different systems: electronic visit logs, timesheets and mileage claims. I have learned that data are only as good as the process that produces them, and that the people recorded in them often have reasons for missing entries that a spreadsheet will never show. I also helped my manager prepare a short summary of how the rise in the National Living Wage affected our staffing costs, which was my first experience of turning numbers into something a non-specialist could act on.

Outside work I coach an under-12 netball team at a local leisure centre on Saturday mornings. It involves planning sessions, keeping track of subs and making sure every girl gets court time, not just the strongest players. I enjoy it for its own sake, though it has made me better at explaining things clearly. I am also learning Swahili through evening classes, partly because of my dissertation and partly because several colleagues speak it and have been patient with my mistakes.

I am applying for a master's in development economics and policy because I want rigorous quantitative skills alongside a serious grounding in the institutions and politics that shape whether policies work. In the longer term I hope to work in policy research on financial inclusion and social protection, whether for a research organisation, a government department or an NGO. I bring careful habits with messy data, a genuine curiosity about how households manage risk, and the persistence to keep working at methods that do not yet come easily to me.