Latin American studies personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

For several years my job involved putting together itineraries for coach tours, and the ones that interested me least were the ones I knew most about. When a colleague began planning departures to Peru and Bolivia, I found myself reading around the destinations in the evenings: not hotel reviews, but why the silver of Potosi mattered to Europe, why Quechua and Aymara are spoken by millions and still treated as minority languages, why the Andean countries have such different relationships with their own indigenous majorities. What began as background reading turned into the thing I thought about on the train home. I want to study Latin American studies because the region forces you to hold several disciplines at once. You cannot understand Mexican land reform without history, politics and economics, and you cannot understand any of it without language. I am drawn to the twentieth century in particular: the growth of cities, the movement of people northwards and the way that memory of dictatorship is argued over in Chile and Argentina decades later. Reading Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America made me want to test his argument rather than accept it, and my Access tutor pointed me towards more recent economic history that complicates it considerably. That process of comparing a persuasive account with the evidence behind it is exactly what I want to spend three years doing properly, with the Spanish to read sources myself and, I hope, enough Portuguese to stop treating Brazil as a footnote.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

I am studying an Access to Higher Education Diploma in Humanities at college, taking history, sociology and academic English. The history units have covered European empires and twentieth-century political movements, and I chose the Mexican Revolution for my extended assignment, which meant reading translated speeches and land decrees alongside modern accounts and noticing how differently Zapata is described depending on who is writing. Sociology has been the bigger surprise: work on migration, ethnicity and inequality has given me vocabulary for patterns I had only vaguely sensed, and I now read statistics with more care about how categories such as indigenous or mestizo are actually defined in censuses. Academic English has taught me to structure an argument and reference properly, which I badly needed after years of writing emails rather than essays. Alongside the diploma I attend a weekly Spanish class and have reached roughly B1. I read short news pieces from El Pais and Argentine outlets with a dictionary, and I listen to a Mexican current affairs podcast on my walk to college, repeating sections until the fast passages come apart. Returning to study in my thirties has meant learning how to learn again: I keep a reading log, book library time on Saturdays before my shift, and have got used to handing work in for criticism rather than polishing it privately. My grades have improved steadily across the year as a result.

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

Nine years of work have given me habits that suit a degree more than I expected. In retail I trained new staff and covered stock ordering, which taught me to explain things clearly and to notice when a system is failing rather than a person. At the coach company I handled bookings, complaints and supplier correspondence, often for customers who were anxious about travelling abroad for the first time. Getting people to trust a plan meant listening properly and being honest about what I did not know, and I now try to bring the same directness to seminars rather than bluffing. I also dealt with Spanish-speaking hotel contacts by email, which is where I first realised my school Spanish was not going to be enough. I volunteer fortnightly at a community food pantry, mostly weighing and shelving deliveries and taking a turn on the welcome desk. Several regular volunteers came to the city from Colombia and Venezuela, and although I do not treat conversations over a tea urn as research, hearing about the practicalities of moving countries, of qualifications not being recognised and of sending money home, has made the migration literature feel less abstract. Outside this I sing in a community choir, where we have worked on Latin American folk arrangements and I have had to manage lyrics in Spanish and Portuguese. I am used to fitting study around shifts and commitments, and I would come to a degree knowing why I am there.

This example has 4,403 characters across the three answers. Use it for ideas and structure. Your own UCAS answers must fit within 4,000 characters in total, including spaces.

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