Gerontology postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My sociology degree taught me to be suspicious of tidy explanations, and nowhere has that been more useful than in my work with older people. I now spend my working week as a scheme administrator for a housing association, mostly based at a sheltered housing scheme of thirty-two flats, and I want to study Gerontology because the questions I meet daily are more complex than either my degree or my job has equipped me to answer.

My undergraduate dissertation was the beginning of that interest. After a bank branch in my home town closed, I interviewed eleven residents aged over seventy about how they managed their money afterwards. I expected to write about digital exclusion, and some of that was there, but what struck me more was how much the branch had been doing besides banking: it was a reason to walk into town, a place where staff noticed if someone looked unwell, a fixed point in the week. Two participants had adapted confidently to telephone banking yet still described the loss as a shrinking of their day. Reading around this, I found Laura Carstensen's socioemotional selectivity theory helpful but incomplete for my data, since my participants were not so much narrowing their social world by choice as having options removed. Learning to sit with that mismatch, rather than forcing the theory onto the interviews, was the most valuable part of my training.

In my job I see the same tension between systems and lives. I arrange contractor visits, keep tenancy records, chase repairs and write the notices that go on the noticeboard. It is administrative work, not care work, but it has taught me a great deal about how policy reaches people. A tenant may be assessed as independent and still be unable to manage a form that assumes she has an email address. Another may refuse an adaptation because accepting a handrail feels like an admission. I have learned to listen for the reasons behind a refusal and to pass concerns to the scheme manager rather than deciding what is best for someone. I have also noticed how differently residents fare depending on whether family live nearby, which has made me interested in the research on loneliness and its measurement, and in how far interventions such as befriending schemes actually address it.

Outside work, I help at a Thursday lunch club, mainly setting out tables, serving and clearing, and I share the practical care of my grandfather with my mother. He has arthritis and limited mobility, so I do his shopping, take him to hospital appointments and sit with him for an afternoon each week. Caring within a family is not the same as reading about care, but it has given me a strong sense of how much unpaid work holds the system together, and how easily it becomes invisible in policy discussions. It has also made me aware of my own assumptions: my grandfather has firm views about what he will and will not accept, and being related to him does not give me authority over them.

I want a grounding in the demography and biology of ageing as well as its social dimensions, because I currently understand ageing mainly through the people I happen to know. I am keen to develop stronger quantitative skills, having used only basic descriptive statistics so far, and to write a dissertation on housing transitions in later life, ideally drawing on interviews with people who have moved into sheltered accommodation. In the longer term I would like to work in research or policy for a housing or care organisation, where evidence about older people's lives can inform decisions that are often made without it.

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