German personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

For most of my twenties German was something I used rather than studied. In the freight office where I worked, the calls from Bremen and Linz came through to my desk because I was the one who would try, and over a few years I went from reading customs paperwork with a dictionary to holding a whole conversation about a delayed pallet. What I enjoyed was not the efficiency of it but the moments when the language did something I had not expected: a haulier telling me a lorry was standing in Hamburg 'seit Ewigkeiten', a colleague explaining that 'doch' had contradicted me politely. I began to want the grammar behind the habits, and then the culture behind the grammar. Studying German at degree level means I can stop treating the language as a tool I borrowed and start understanding how it works and what has been written in it. I am drawn to the way German literature keeps returning to divided places and divided memory; reading Jenny Erpenbeck's 'Go, Went, Gone' in translation, and then slowly in German, showed me how much a novel can do with bureaucratic language, which I recognised from my own working life. I am also interested in how the language varies across regions and borders, and in translation as a discipline with its own difficult choices rather than a matter of swapping words. A year abroad is a large part of the appeal: I have visited Germany as a tourist and briefly for work, but living and studying there would let me test everything I have learned in a setting I do not control.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

I left school with GCSEs, including a B in German, and went straight into work, so returning to study has meant rebuilding habits from the beginning. Over the past year I have completed an Access to Higher Education Diploma in Humanities at my local college, choosing modules in literature, history and academic writing. The literature units were the most useful preparation: I wrote about narrative voice in a short story collection and had to learn how to structure an argument around close reading rather than opinion, which took several drafts and honest feedback from my tutor. For the history component I researched the Berlin airlift and found myself more interested in the propaganda posters and newspaper language than the logistics, which told me something about where I should be heading. Alongside the Access course I have attended a weekly German evening class at roughly B1 level, working through cases, the passive and word order in subordinate clauses in a way I never did at school. I now keep a grammar notebook and test myself on strong verbs on the bus. Outside formal study I read a page of Deutsche Welle's slower news each morning, watch crime dramas with German subtitles rather than English ones, and have worked through a bilingual edition of Kafka's short prose, comparing the translator's choices with my own attempts at a sentence. I know that a degree will ask far more of me linguistically, particularly in writing essays in German, and the Access year has given me a realistic sense of how much time that preparation takes.

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

Eleven years in a freight forwarding office taught me how to work steadily under pressure and how to ask good questions when an answer does not make sense. I was responsible for tracking consignments, chasing paperwork and explaining delays to customers who were not pleased to hear from me, often while translating between what a driver had told me in imperfect English and what a client needed in plain terms. That work built patience, accuracy with detail and a tolerance for not understanding everything at once, all of which I rely on when a long German sentence refuses to unfold. I also trained two new starters on our system, which made me realise how much clearer my own thinking becomes when I have to explain it. Outside work I have volunteered at a community library for the past three years, running the returns desk on Saturday mornings and helping with a reading group for adults who are rebuilding their confidence with books; listening to people describe what they got from a novel has shaped how I read. I sing with a local choir, where we have learned settings of Heine and Goethe, and following the German text while singing it has done more for my ear than any exercise. At home I share care of my grandmother's shopping and appointments with my sister, which means I plan my studying around fixed commitments and have learned to use short blocks of time properly. I am applying as a mature student with a clear idea of why, and I intend to make full use of the teaching, the reading and the year abroad.

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