Economics, behaviour and policy personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

What pulled me towards economics was noticing how often people behave in ways that a simple model of self-interest does not predict, and how much of policy depends on getting those predictions right. My A level course taught me consumer surplus and marginal utility, and I found the framework genuinely useful, but the part that stayed with me was a lesson on why so many households stay on expensive default energy tariffs when cheaper ones are a few clicks away. Studying psychology alongside economics gave me language for this: defaults are sticky, effort is costly in ways money cannot measure, and people discount future savings heavily. Reading Thinking, Fast and Slow gave me a clearer sense of how systematically these patterns appear, and how careful researchers have to be about the difference between an interesting laboratory result and something that will survive contact with a real population. I want a degree that treats this as a serious empirical question rather than a collection of anecdotes. The appeal of this course is that it links behavioural evidence to the sectors where it actually gets applied: pensions, energy, health, taxation. I would like to work eventually in policy analysis or evaluation, and I want to be the person who can read a trial design critically and say honestly whether it shows what it claims.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

Economics A level has been the backbone of my preparation, particularly the macroeconomic policy section, where I learned to structure an argument around trade-offs rather than a single conclusion. Mathematics matters more than I expected when I chose it. Differentiation made marginal analysis feel like a natural consequence rather than a rule to memorise, and the statistics work on sampling and hypothesis testing has made me much more cautious when reading claims about what an intervention achieved. Psychology has been the most useful complement. Studying research methods properly, including the difference between correlation and a controlled comparison, and how easily demand characteristics shape results, has changed how I read anything describing human behaviour. For my EPQ I wrote about attempts to change household energy use through information rather than price, comparing arguments for social comparison messaging on bills with the concern that effects fade once the novelty passes. Narrowing the question was the hardest part; my first plan covered all environmental behaviour and was unworkable. I also learned to be honest in writing about evidence I found unconvincing rather than only using sources that suited my argument. Alongside this I have kept reading beyond the syllabus, including Tim Harford's writing on statistics, which is where I first understood how much depends on what is being counted.

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

With a friend from my economics class I ran a small survey project at college, mostly because we wanted to test something ourselves rather than read about it. We asked around ninety students to choose between a smaller snack offered immediately and a larger one collected the following week, then repeated the question with both delayed. The pattern of some people switching preference matched what our textbook described about present bias, though our sample was small, self-selecting and collected in a busy corridor, so I would not claim more than that we saw something consistent with it. Splitting the work taught me a lot: my friend handled the recruitment and I built the spreadsheet, and we had to agree definitions before we started because our first attempt produced answers we could not compare. Weekend work on the tills at a garden centre has been an unexpectedly good education in decision-making. I have watched customers reach for the plant with the clearest care label over the healthier one beside it, and I helped rewrite our handwritten signs so the price per litre of compost was shown, which cut the number of people asking us to work it out. Coaching a junior badminton group on Saturday mornings has made me better at explaining one idea clearly and noticing when a person has stopped following. I balance around eight hours of paid work a week with coursework by planning my week on Sunday evenings, which I expect to be useful when reading lists get longer.

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