Intercultural communication postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Last spring our GP surgery sent a text reminder to every patient booked for a flu jab: "Please attend promptly, or your appointment may be cancelled." Within an hour, a Polish-speaking patient I had helped several times rang, upset, asking whether she had done something wrong. She had read the message as a warning addressed to her personally. Nothing in the wording was inaccurate, yet it carried a tone the practice never intended. Moments like this, small and ordinary, are why I want to study intercultural communication at postgraduate level.

I graduated with a 2:1 in English Language and Spanish, having spent my third year working as a language assistant in a secondary school in Valladolid. My dissertation grew out of that year. I collected sixty anonymised email requests written by Spanish and British undergraduates to imagined lecturers, using a short scenario survey, and coded them for directness, mitigation and forms of address. Using Brown and Levinson's politeness framework, I found that the Spanish group more often used direct imperatives softened by warm greetings, while the British group relied on hedges such as "I was wondering if". My supervisor pushed me to question whether these were national patterns or effects of my small, self-selected sample, and that discussion was the most useful part of the project. I concluded cautiously, but I became convinced that labels like "direct" and "indirect" cultures explain less than they appear to, and I want to examine that properly.

Since graduating I have worked as a receptionist at a busy surgery in a part of the city where many patients speak Polish, Romanian, Arabic or Spanish at home. Although I am not a qualified interpreter and our practice uses a professional telephone service for consultations, I am often the first point of contact. I have learned to slow down without sounding patronising, to check understanding by asking patients to tell me back what they will do next, and to notice when silence means confusion rather than agreement. After the text message incident, I suggested to the practice manager that we review our standard reminders. Together we rewrote three of them in plainer, less threatening language, and she now asks me to read new patient letters before they go out. It is modest work, but it showed me how institutional language positions people, often without anyone noticing.

Outside work I help on Thursday evenings at a free conversation club in a community centre, where adults practise English over tea. I usually run the table for beginners. One regular, a retired engineer from Syria, corrects my pronunciation of Arabic place names as carefully as I help him with phrasal verbs, and those exchanges remind me that learning moves in both directions. I also play five-a-side on Sundays with a mixed group from work and the club, which has nothing to do with linguistics, although the shouted mixture of English and Spanish across the pitch is its own kind of data.

My reading since university has followed questions raised at work. Adrian Holliday's critique of essentialist ideas of culture helped me put words to my unease about my dissertation's categories, and I have been reading about intercultural competence as something developed through reflection rather than simply possessed. I would like to explore how public services communicate with multilingual communities, particularly in written messages where there is no chance to repair misunderstanding in the moment.

Postgraduate study would give me the theoretical grounding and research methods to move from noticing these problems to investigating them rigorously. I bring a solid foundation in pragmatics, fluent Spanish, practical experience with people across many language backgrounds, and a habit of asking why a message landed the way it did. I would like to develop those into the skills of a careful researcher.