Information resource management postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My history dissertation was meant to be about a slum clearance scheme in my home town in the 1960s. It became, in practice, a study of how records survive. The council minutes were complete and well indexed; the tenant correspondence that would have told me what residents actually thought had been weeded, and what remained sat in three unlabelled boxes with no finding aid. I wrote the dissertation I could write rather than the one I planned, and I came away more interested in the systems that decide what is findable than in the period itself. Information resource management is where I want to work, and I would like to study it properly rather than continue picking it up in fragments.

Since graduating I have worked as an administrative assistant in the tenancy services team of a housing association. Much of my week is unremarkable: logging correspondence, updating tenancy files, retrieving documents for colleagues. It has, though, taught me a great deal about information as an operational problem rather than an academic one. Our case management system allows free-text naming of uploaded documents, so the same type of letter appears under half a dozen descriptions and colleagues frequently cannot find what they know exists. I proposed and now maintain a short naming convention for the documents my team uploads, agreed with my line manager, and I wrote a one-page guide for new starters. It is a small intervention with no formal authority behind it, but retrieval in our shared folders is noticeably quicker, and it made me want to understand metadata standards and controlled vocabularies as something more rigorous than local habit.

Twice a month I volunteer at the county archive, where I help with box listing under the supervision of an assistant archivist. I have worked mainly on the deposited records of a defunct engineering firm, producing item-level descriptions from a template and flagging material that needs conservation attention or a closure review. The pace surprised me: a single box of wage books and site photographs can take an afternoon to describe well. I also spent a week shadowing a records manager in a local authority information governance team, sitting in on a retention schedule review and watching how freedom of information requests are logged and routed. I was an observer and made no decisions, but I saw how much depends on classification choices made years earlier by people who never met the requester.

My reading has followed these questions. I found Elizabeth Shepherd and Geoffrey Yeo's Managing Records useful for understanding appraisal and retention as deliberate processes rather than administrative housekeeping, and Michelle Caswell's writing on archival silences helped me think about my dissertation experience in less personal terms. I want to develop technical skills I currently lack: cataloguing and metadata standards, database and systems design, digital preservation, and the legal framework around data protection and access. My degree gave me source criticism and the ability to write clearly for different readers; it did not give me the vocabulary or the tools that an information professional needs, and I am conscious of the difference between helping in an archive and being responsible for a collection.

After the course I would like to work in records management or information governance in the public or charity sector, where the volume of material is large and the resources are modest. I am used to working steadily on detailed tasks, and to explaining systems to colleagues who have no interest in them and simply need to find a document. Studying this subject formally would let me do that work on a firmer footing.

Review this personal statement

Latest reviews