Information Science, Systems, and Technology (BS) personal statement example

Personal statement example

Every spring the garden centre where I work weekends receives hundreds of bedding plants, and every spring a few trays arrive with labels that the till does not recognise. The customer is holding a geranium, the screen insists it is compost, and a queue builds behind them. After two seasons on the tills I started noticing a pattern. The errors were rarely the scanner's fault. They came from a supplier code that had been entered once, slightly wrong, and then copied into every later delivery. Fixing the price for one customer took seconds, but the mistake stayed in the system until someone traced it back. I began jotting down the faulty codes on a notepad by the till and passing them to the stock manager at the end of each shift. It was a small habit, but it showed me that information problems often look like people problems until you follow the data to its source.

That interest in how people actually use information systems shaped my Extended Project. At my school, homework is set through an online platform that sends automatic notifications, yet teachers constantly complained that students had not seen their tasks. I wanted to know why. I surveyed sixty students in Years 9 and 10 and interviewed eight of them, and Psychology helped me design questions that did not lead people towards the answer I expected. The results were more ordinary than I had assumed. Most students did see the notifications, but they arrived in a batch late in the evening, used the same subject line for every task and did not mention the due date. Students had learnt to ignore them. I drafted a revised reminder template that put the subject and deadline first, and my Head of Year agreed to let two form groups try it for half a term. Their tutors reported fewer missed deadlines. I was careful in my write-up not to claim more than a small, uncontrolled trial could show, but it was satisfying to see a change I had argued for put into use.

Reading Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things while I worked on the project gave me vocabulary for what I had been seeing. His idea that a well-designed object should make its possible actions discoverable, and that users blamed for 'errors' are often responding sensibly to poor design, matched both the notification problem and the till. In Computer Science I enjoy writing code, but I have found I am most engaged when a program meets a real person who did not write it.

Outside school I help run the court rota for my local badminton club. When I joined, bookings lived on a paper sheet pinned in the sports hall, and members regularly turned up to find their slot double-booked. I moved the rota into a shared online calendar with a simple sign-up form, then spent several weeks helping older members who preferred the paper version until they were comfortable with it. That part taught me more than the setup did. A system nobody trusts is not finished, however neat it looks.

Not everything I do connects to computing. Most months I go fell walking with my uncle, and I have become the person who plans routes, checks weather forecasts and packs the spare map. I like the mix of preparation and adapting when conditions change.

I want to study information science because it sits where my interests already meet: data, the systems that hold it, and the people who depend on both. I am looking forward to learning the methods that will let me ask these questions more rigorously than a notepad by the till allows.