Interdisciplinary Futures MA (Hons) personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

Every January the garden centre where I work on Saturdays orders its spring seed stock, and last year my manager asked me to help compare three years of sales sheets. Seeds for greenhouse tomatoes were selling less while drought-tolerant herbs were selling more, but nobody could say whether that reflected the weather, prices or a social media trend. Deciding what to order meant making a judgement about the future using evidence from several directions at once, and I found that puzzle absorbing. I want to study Interdisciplinary Futures because it treats questions like this seriously, asking how we can reason about what has not happened yet without pretending to certainty. Reading The Good Ancestor by Roman Krznaric made me think about who is left out when decisions are made on short timescales. His idea of cathedral thinking, planning for outcomes we will not live to see, struck me as appealing but difficult to put into practice. I am drawn to a degree that combines methods from the social sciences, humanities and sciences, because my own questions keep refusing to sit inside one subject.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My Extended Project asked whether my town's flood plans are prepared for conditions in 2070. I read the local flood risk strategy alongside climate projections published by the Environment Agency, and I interviewed a parish councillor about how decisions are made. To organise my thinking I used a futures wheel, which helped me trace second-order effects. Higher insurance costs, for example, could lead to empty shops on the high street. I concluded that the plans were technically detailed but said little about how residents might adapt their own homes. Geography gave me fieldwork skills: for my coursework I measured channel width and velocity at six sites on our river and learned how much one wet afternoon can skew a dataset. In Maths, the statistics content showed me how to test whether a trend is meaningful rather than simply noticeable, which I later applied to the seed sales. English Literature has been equally useful. Studying Never Let Me Go made me think about how fiction presents a future as ordinary and accepted, and I have become more alert to the assumptions hidden inside confident predictions, including my own. Using the futures wheel also reminded me that a plausible consequence is a scenario to investigate, not a prediction supported merely by drawing a connection.

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

Last summer I spent a week with my district council's sustainability team. Most of my time went on helping at a drop-in event about a proposed cycle route. I set out the maps, invited visitors to add comments on sticky notes and afterwards typed up around two hundred responses into themes for an officer to review. I noticed that older residents mostly worried about parking during construction, while parents wanted to know about safety near the primary school. Many people seemed unsure what the route might look like in ten years, which made me think about how hard it is to discuss change that people cannot yet see. At the garden centre I have progressed from watering plants to running the till and answering customer questions, and I now help train new Saturday staff. On weekdays I collect my younger brother from school and supervise his homework until my parents get home, which has taught me to plan my own study time carefully. I also play surdo drum in a community samba band that performs at local fêtes. Keeping time for twenty people is a responsibility I enjoy, and it has introduced me to people from very different backgrounds in my town.