Liberal Studies, MLSt postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

On Tuesday evenings I sit in a converted cupboard at our local community centre and read the week's newspaper aloud for the town's talking newspaper, which is recorded and sent to residents with sight loss. Another volunteer and I divide the pages between us. The work has made me notice how much of a story's meaning depends on choices nobody reads aloud: which photograph was chosen, what sits beside the article, which voice is quoted first. Listeners sometimes phone the coordinator to say a piece made no sense without the picture, and we have learned to describe images briefly before we begin. That small adjustment, between print, sound and the person at the other end, is close to the kind of question I would like to study at postgraduate level.

My undergraduate degree combined English and Geography, and I chose it because I could not decide which interested me more: how places are written about, or how they actually work. My dissertation brought the two together. I compared local newspaper coverage of the 1947 floods in a Fenland parish with oral history recordings held by the county archive, made with residents several decades later. The newspapers emphasised breached banks, emergency repairs and official visits. The recordings returned again and again to livestock, borrowed boats and which families took in their neighbours. I did not conclude that one source was truer than the other. Instead I argued that each framed responsibility differently, the press locating it with engineers and authorities, residents locating it in neighbourliness and in the land itself. Listening to hours of recordings and transcribing extracts taught me patience with sources that do not answer the question you arrive with.

The module I found most useful in hindsight was a cultural geography seminar where we read Raymond Williams's Keywords. His approach of tracing how words such as nature and culture shifted in meaning over time gave me a way to examine vocabulary in my own material. I noticed, for instance, that the newspapers called the water an enemy, while residents more often described it as simply having come in. I would like to develop that kind of close reading across disciplines more deliberately, with grounding in history, philosophy and the social sciences that my degree only touched on.

Since graduating I have worked as a customer service adviser for a regional water company. It is not glamorous work, but it is surprisingly relevant. During dry summers I take calls about hosepipe restrictions, and during heavy rain about flooding and sewer overflows. Customers rarely describe a problem in the company's categories, and part of my job is translating between someone's account of water in their garden and the codes our system requires. I was recently asked to help draft clearer wording for our standard text messages, and two of my suggested phrasings were adopted. The experience has strengthened my sense that institutions and the public often talk past each other, and that the gap is worth understanding rather than merely smoothing over.

Outside work I attend an evening pottery class. I am an average potter at best, but throwing a bowl that collapses because the clay was too wet has given me respect for knowledge that lives in the hands rather than on the page, something the oral histories also reminded me of.

A liberal studies degree appeals to me because my questions do not belong to a single department. I want to think more rigorously about how communities record and remember shared events, drawing on literature, history and environmental thought, and I would hope to produce a substantial independent project on water, language and local memory. I bring experience of archival work, steady habits from full-time employment, and daily practice in listening to people explain things in their own terms. I would welcome the chance to build those into sustained, disciplined scholarship.