Interdisciplinary studies personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

My three A levels were chosen because I could not decide between them, and I have gradually stopped seeing that as indecision. In Geography I studied urban food deserts; in Biology I learned how iron deficiency affects concentration; in History I looked at rationing and the 1940s British diet. The same subject kept appearing wearing different clothes. What interests me is the space between those accounts: a nutritional explanation of poor health in a neighbourhood is not wrong, but it is incomplete without planning decisions, bus routes and the history of who was moved where. A single discipline gives me a clean method and a narrow question. I would like a degree that lets me keep the methods while widening the question. Reading Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics showed me how a diagram can be used to argue that economics needs ecology and social science to make sense, and it made me think carefully about what happens when an idea travels between fields. Some of it clarifies; some of it loses precision. I want to be taught how to judge which. I am also drawn to interdisciplinary study because I expect to change my mind. At sixteen I was certain I wanted to do medicine, and the reason I no longer do is that I found the surrounding questions more interesting than the clinical ones. A broad degree is not a way of avoiding commitment for me; it is a commitment to working on problems that will not sit still inside one department.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

Geography has given me the most transferable training. For my independent investigation I surveyed pedestrian use of a redeveloped high street in my town, counting footfall at three points on six occasions and interviewing eleven shoppers. Designing the sampling frame taught me more about honest evidence than any lesson: my morning counts were skewed by the school run, and I had to say so in the evaluation rather than quietly smooth it out. Biology has trained me in precision and in the discipline of controls, which I now notice missing when newspapers report on diet. History has been the least like the other two and probably the most useful. Writing on interwar public health, I had to weigh a medical officer's report against oral testimony and accept that both were partial. That is a different standard of proof from a biology practical, and holding the two standards in mind at once is exactly what I think interdisciplinary work demands. Outside the syllabus I took an online introductory course in statistics over last summer, mainly so that I could read graphs in papers without guessing, and I have been working through Tim Harford's How to Make the World Add Up, which has changed how I read any claim with a number in it. I also attended a free evening talk at my local museum on the history of allotment legislation, which was drier than it sounds and gave me a useful vocabulary for land use.

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

Most weekday mornings I get my younger brother ready for school and settled with his transport, and I look after him on Saturday afternoons while my mother works. He is autistic and dislikes changes to routine, so I have learned to plan backwards from a deadline and to explain things in more than one way until one version works. It has made me patient with people who need information presented differently, and organised out of necessity: my revision happens in fixed ninety-minute blocks because those are the blocks I actually have. For two years I have volunteered at a community allotment linked to the library, mainly weeding, watering and helping at the seed swap in March. I keep the borrowing record for the tool shed, which sounds trivial but stopped us losing forks. Talking to the retired members there has taught me a good deal about soil, frost dates and local history that I would not have found in a textbook, and it is where my interest in food and land came from. I also do some shifts at a garden centre café, clearing tables and working the till, which has taught me to stay pleasant when it is busy and to notice who needs helping to a seat. In my own time I play clarinet in a community wind band, badly but improvingly, and I read a lot of nineteenth-century novels. None of that is directly relevant to a degree, though the band has taught me to count myself in and keep going after a mistake.

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