General studies personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

What attracts me to an interdisciplinary degree is that my best pieces of work have always come from putting two subjects next to each other. Writing a Geography coursework piece on flooding in my local area, I found I could not explain why one neighbourhood had been protected and another had not without reading nineteenth-century maps, council minutes and a good deal about who owned what. My History teacher lent me a chapter on urban development and my Geography teacher gave me the flood risk data. Between them I produced something neither subject alone would have asked for. I want a degree that treats that overlap as the point rather than an inconvenience. I am also aware that broad study demands more self-discipline, not less: without a single method to fall back on I have to decide what counts as good evidence in each case, and defend that choice. Reading Peter Burke's What is Cultural History? helped me see that disciplines argue about their own boundaries constantly, and that these arguments are worth understanding rather than avoiding. Longer term I am interested in work in local government, heritage or public information services, all of which seem to need people who can read a statistical report and a planning document and a letter from a resident and hold all three in mind at once. I would rather build that range deliberately over three years than specialise now and hope breadth arrives later.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My three A levels have given me three different habits of thinking, which I have come to value separately. English Literature taught me to slow down over language: studying Othello, I learned how much of an argument can rest on a single repeated word, and how tempting it is to import a reading from a critic before doing the close work myself. History has been the most demanding on evidence. Our unit on the Cold War involved weighing memoirs against official documents, and I found the disagreements between historians more interesting than the chronology. I keep a notebook of interpretations I disagree with and why, which has made my essay planning far quicker. Geography has supplied the quantitative side: I am comfortable with graphs, sampling methods and the limits of small data sets, and fieldwork taught me that measurements are only as good as the day you took them. Outside lessons I completed an extended project on how city centres are used after dark, which involved reading planning consultation documents and a lot of methodical note-taking. I also took a free online short course on statistics for social research, mostly because I wanted to understand survey confidence intervals properly rather than quote figures I could not interrogate. I read the London Review of Books when I can get a copy from the library, largely to see how writers move between fields in a single essay.

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

For two weeks last summer I volunteered at a heritage centre near my home. My tasks were straightforward: greeting visitors, handing out activity sheets to school groups and helping a member of staff repackage photographs into archival sleeves under her instruction. What I took from it was less practical than observational. I watched the education officer adapt the same story about the local ribbon-weaving trade for a Year 3 group and for a room of retired visitors, and noticed how much of her preparation was about anticipating what each audience already knew. I now volunteer one afternoon a week at my town library, sitting alongside staff at the community information desk. I do not advise anyone; I restock leaflets, help people find the right form on the public computers and pass questions on. It has shown me how often a single enquiry crosses several fields at once, from housing to benefits to translation, and how patiently the staff unpick them. My Saturday job in a garden centre café keeps me organised under pressure and has taught me to be pleasant to people who are not always pleasant back. On Saturdays I also look after my two younger cousins for a few hours, which has improved my planning more than any revision timetable. Netball each Wednesday gives me a fixed point in the week and a group of people who do not care what I think about interdisciplinary method, which I find useful.

This example has 4,238 characters across the three answers. Use it for ideas and structure. Your own UCAS answers must fit within 4,000 characters in total, including spaces.

Review this personal statement

Latest reviews