Latin personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

What keeps me interested in Latin is how much work a single line will repay. In class we spent most of a fortnight on the opening of Aeneid IV, and I remember being irritated at how slowly we moved until I noticed that the word order kept putting Dido's wound before her name. Once I saw that, the rest of the book read differently. Latin rewards patience in a way that few things I do rewards patience, and I like the fact that a careful reader with a dictionary and a grammar can argue with a published translation and sometimes be right.

I am also drawn to the sheer spread of what Latin unlocks. My A level set texts are Augustan, but the Latin on the memorial tablets in my local parish church is seventeenth and eighteenth century, and much of it is clumsy, formulaic and oddly moving. Reading Mary Beard's SPQR made me more sceptical about treating Roman writers as straightforward reporters, and I have started asking who a text was written for before asking what it says.

At degree level I want to read much more widely than a syllabus allows, particularly historiography and letters, and to get properly to grips with the language rather than relying on half-remembered vocabulary. I would also like to take linguistics options, because I am curious about how Latin changed in ordinary speech rather than how it was frozen in literature. Studying it for three or four years, with time to be genuinely slow, is what I want next.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My A levels in Latin, History and English Literature support each other closely. History has taught me to handle sources with dates, motives and gaps, which changed how I read Tacitus; English has taught me to write about form without simply listing devices. In Latin I have translated Cicero and Virgil and I find unseen translation the most satisfying part of the course, partly because it is impossible to bluff.

I came to Latin late, in Year 9, when a teacher started a lunchtime club with a class set of old textbooks. Because we covered the early grammar quickly, I had to rebuild it properly in Year 11, and I did that by writing my own reference sheets, one per construction, with examples taken from real sentences rather than invented ones. I still use them and have added to them; the ablative absolute sheet is on its fourth version.

For my Extended Project I compared three published translations of Catullus 64 with my own attempt at a passage of about thirty lines. Doing my own version first made me notice choices the translators had made that I would otherwise have skimmed past, especially where English needs a subject that Latin leaves implicit. I was marked well on it, though the most useful outcome was learning how long a genuinely careful translation takes.

I have also taught myself the Greek alphabet and enough vocabulary to follow a facing-page text, which I hope to build on formally.

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

For the past year I have been recording the Latin inscriptions in two churches near my home. I photograph each tablet, transcribe it, expand the abbreviations and translate it, then note anything odd. One memorial uses a superlative where the grammar wants a comparative, and another dates a death by the regnal year of a king, which sent me to the parish records to check. It is a modest project, not a discovery, but it has made me much quicker at reading abbreviations and much more willing to say when I cannot make sense of something.

With a friend from my Latin class I run a fortnightly reading group for Year 8 and 9 pupils who are considering the GCSE. We share the planning: she prepares the vocabulary and I prepare the passage and the questions. Keeping eleven-year-olds interested in the passive voice has forced me to explain grammar in more than one way, and to admit when a rule has exceptions rather than pretending it does not.

On Saturdays I work in the plant section of a garden centre, which involves watering, restocking and answering questions from customers who know far more about gardening than I do. I have got better at saying that I will find out rather than guessing, and I have picked up a fair number of botanical names, which are a reminder that Latin is still being used to label things.

At home I share the school run for my younger brother two mornings a week, which has made me organised about when I actually work.

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