Development policy postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My interest in development policy grew out of a fairly narrow question: why some households are able to absorb a shock and others are not. I encountered it first academically, in a second-year module on economic geography, and then daily at work. I have spent two years as a customer adviser at a credit union, where I take loan applications, explain interest and default, and sit with people who are trying to smooth an income that arrives unevenly. The mechanics are not unlike those described in Banerjee and Duflo's Poor Economics, which I read shortly after starting the job: lumpy incomes, the cost of small-scale borrowing, and the way sensible decisions can still produce bad outcomes when the surrounding institutions are weak. What struck me was less the novelty of the argument than the discipline of the method, and that is what I want to train in properly.

My degree gave me the foundations. I took quantitative methods and a module on states and markets, and for my dissertation I looked at the withdrawal of subsidised bus routes in my borough and what it meant for access to GP surgeries and the hospital. I could not commission travel surveys, so I worked with what was free: timetable archives, the council's published tender decisions, journey-time calculations, and deprivation data at lower-layer output area level. I mapped changes in off-peak journey times to the two nearest surgeries and compared them across wards. The findings were modest and I was careful not to overstate them, but the process taught me about the gap between a policy decision recorded in a committee paper and its distributional consequences, and about how much of evaluation is arguing honestly over what your data cannot show. My supervisor's main criticism, that I had not thought hard enough about what would have happened anyway, has shaped how I now read impact studies.

Since graduating I have kept working at that gap in a small way. Using the credit union's anonymised aggregate reporting, which is published for members, I put together a short internal note on seasonal patterns in small loan demand around school holidays and uniform costs. It is not research; it is a descriptive summary that my manager found useful when planning staffing. But writing it forced me to learn to use R for something other than coursework, and to explain a chart to people who had no interest in the method. I also volunteer at a homework club on Saturdays, mostly maths with eleven and twelve year olds, which has made me sceptical of interventions that assume attendance and attention are free goods.

What I want from postgraduate study is rigour I cannot give myself. I can read an evaluation and follow the argument; I cannot yet design one, and I have only a working grasp of the econometrics behind difference-in-differences or instrumental variables. I am interested in social protection and cash transfers, particularly the debates about targeting versus universality and the administrative costs that are often left out of the comparison. I would like to be able to assess those trade-offs with real technical confidence, including the political economy of who gets counted and who administers the payment.

Afterwards I hope to work in policy analysis, either for a development agency or in the public sector here, where the questions about income volatility and access are recognisably related. I am used to studying alongside full-time work and to managing my own reading, and I would come to the course with a clear sense of what I need to learn and why.

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