Liberal arts and sciences personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

My interest in interdisciplinary study grew out of a stubborn question I could not answer in any one lesson. In Geography we studied regeneration schemes and measured their success in jobs and floorspace. In History, I was reading about the closure of the pits and the way community institutions carried on afterwards: the choirs, the welfare halls, the allotments. The two accounts of my own town would not line up. The geography told me about footfall and vacancy rates; the history told me about who felt they belonged and who had left. Neither on its own explained why the new retail park feels busy but empty of anything I would call life. Mathematics gave me a third angle, because I began to notice how much depends on what gets counted and what does not. A survey that records spending will not notice people who sit on a bench for an hour because it is warm. I want a degree that lets me hold these approaches together rather than choosing one and apologising for the others. What appeals to me about liberal arts and sciences is the expectation that you learn the methods properly, not just the vocabulary, and then have to justify why a particular method suits a particular question. I am also drawn to the discomfort of it. Working across fields means being the least experienced person in the room fairly often, and having to read statistics carefully when my instinct is to trust a good narrative. I would rather spend three years practising that than become fluent in one way of describing the world and assume it covers everything.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My A-levels have trained quite different habits of mind, and comparing them has been useful in itself. Geography fieldwork taught me to design a method before collecting anything: my coursework on river channel characteristics forced me to think about sampling intervals and what my results could and could not support. History has been the harder discipline for me, because there is no equivalent of a correct answer. Studying Welsh industrial and social history, I learned to weigh a union minute book against a newspaper report and to notice whose voice the archive happens to have preserved. Mathematics keeps me honest. Working through statistics, particularly hypothesis testing, showed me how easily a confident-sounding claim rests on assumptions nobody has stated.

Most of my wider reading comes from the library. Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities changed how I walk down my own street, because her argument is built from close observation of ordinary pavements and the people using them at different hours, rather than from planning theory. I read it alongside a geography textbook chapter on urban models and enjoyed how badly they fit together. I have also read Tim Harford's How to Make the World Add Up, which sharpened my questions about where figures come from, and Raymond Williams' The Country and the City, slowly, which I found difficult but which gave me a vocabulary for the way places get imagined by people who do not live in them. I am now trying some philosophy of science, mainly to understand what counts as evidence in different fields, because that seems to be the question a broad degree will keep returning to.

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

Last autumn I set myself a small project on our high street, partly because I wanted to test whether my impressions matched anything measurable. Over ten weeks I spent an hour on Tuesday and Saturday mornings recording how many people passed a fixed point, how many buses arrived and whether they were late, and which units were occupied. I kept it all in a notebook and then a spreadsheet, and made a simple set of charts. The findings were modest: Saturday footfall was much higher, bus punctuality was worse than the timetable suggested, and three units changed use in ten weeks. What I learned most was about the limits of my own method. My counts said nothing about why people were there, and I had chosen a spot that happened to be near the pharmacy, which probably skewed everything. I wrote up the problems as honestly as the results and showed it to my geography teacher, who pushed me on sampling bias.

My Saturday job in a bakery has taught me things no project could. Serving the same customers weekly, I have come to know the rhythms of the street from the inside, including which regulars come in mainly to talk. Handling the till and the bread order has also made me quicker with rough arithmetic under pressure.

I help my neighbour run a monthly seed and cuttings swap in the community hall. I make the posters, set out tables and keep the labelling list, and I have learned to explain the same instructions three different ways depending on who is asking. At home I share the school-run and cooking on the days my mother works late, which means my study time is planned rather than spontaneous. That discipline is probably the most transferable thing I bring to a degree where nobody will be checking my reading for me.

This example has 4,951 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.

Review this personal statement

Latest reviews