Digital Media & Information Studies [MA] personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

The envelope of photographs I was handed on my first morning at our town's heritage centre was labelled, in pencil, 'Carnival?'. Inside were forty prints of floats, crowds and a brass band, with no dates and only two names written on the back. As a summer volunteer working alongside the collections officer, my job was to scan them and complete a spreadsheet so they could be added to the centre's online catalogue. By lunchtime I realised that the question mark mattered more than the scanning. If I typed 'carnival, 1950s', someone searching later would find those prints. If I left the field empty, they would barely exist online. That small decision is why I want to study digital media and information together. I am interested in how information is described, stored and retrieved. I am equally interested in the cultures that grow around it, such as why one photograph is shared widely on a local Facebook group while a better-documented one sits unseen. Reading Safiya Umoja Noble's Algorithms of Oppression showed me that search results are not neutral, and that the people and companies who design classification systems shape what users come to accept as obvious. I want a degree that lets me study both the technical structures and the social questions, rather than choosing between them.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My A-level subjects are Computer Science, History and English Language, and each gives me a different route into this course. For my Computer Science NEA, I am building a loan system for the school music department's instruments, using Python and an SQLite database. Designing the tables taught me why consistent field names and data types matter. My first version stored dates as free text, which broke the overdue-loans report. Normalising the database was dry work, but it made the later stages straightforward, and I now notice badly structured forms everywhere. History has trained me to ask who produced a source and for which audience. For my coursework on the 1984–85 miners' strike, I compared newspaper front pages with oral history recordings available online. I found that the way the recordings were catalogued affected which voices were easiest to find. English Language introduced me to discourse analysis. I wrote a short investigation into how three supermarket apps phrase their notifications, comparing direct imperatives with softer suggestions, and I enjoyed being precise about language in a digital setting. Outside the syllabus, I completed a free online introduction to SQL. I also read about the Dublin Core metadata standard after the collections officer mentioned it, which helped me understand why her spreadsheet had the columns it did.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

The heritage centre placement lasted two weeks and was closely supervised. I scanned prints at set resolutions and entered titles, descriptions and subject keywords from an agreed list. I flagged anything uncertain for the collections officer to check. She showed me how she writes image descriptions for people using screen readers, which I had never considered before. I also helped at a session where older residents tried to identify faces in photographs. I recorded their suggestions, and four previously unnamed prints gained names once she had verified them. Since Year 12 I have worked Saturdays on the tills and shop floor at a garden centre. It is not media work, but helping customers who cannot find a product has made me think about signs, shelf labels and website categories. Some match the way people actually search, and others do not. I am dependable on busy bank holidays, and my manager now asks me to train new weekend staff on the tills. I play bass in a three-piece band with friends, and I look after our Bandcamp page and gig listings. Checking which posts actually bring people to a gig has been a practical lesson in audiences, although mostly it is just enjoyable. Each of these roles has given me confidence in handling other people's information carefully, and I am keen to build on that through study.