Master Applied Cognitive Psychology (MSc) postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Four nights a week I wear a headset that tells me where to go. In the distribution warehouse where I work as a picker, a synthetic voice reads out an aisle, a bay and a check digit, I say the digit back, and it gives me a quantity. Nobody uses paper and nobody looks at a screen. Within a fortnight I noticed that colleagues who had come from paper-based sites made most of their errors on the second item of a two-item pick, when the voice gave two quantities in quick succession. I started to wonder how much of that was about the system and how much was about memory. That kind of question, about how people actually think while doing ordinary work, is why I want to study applied cognitive psychology at postgraduate level.

My undergraduate degree gave me a solid grounding in cognition, statistics and research methods, and I graduated with a 2:1. The modules I enjoyed most dealt with attention and working memory, partly because the theories could be tested so directly. For my dissertation I studied interruptions. Participants from the departmental pool completed a simple data-entry task online and were interrupted at different points by a short arithmetic problem. I measured how long they took to resume and whether they re-entered or skipped fields. Writing the task myself in an online experiment builder taught me how many small design decisions, such as where the cursor sits after an interruption, can change behaviour. I framed my predictions using Altmann and Trafton's memory for goals model, which treats a suspended goal as something that decays and needs rehearsal or a cue to be retrieved. My results were modest and my sample was smaller than I wanted, but I was pleased that the effect of interruption position appeared in the direction I expected. The experience also showed me what I still need to learn, particularly mixed-effects modelling, which I could only use at a basic level.

Reading Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things during my final year changed how I looked at my job. His distinction between slips, where the intention is right but the action goes wrong, and mistakes, where the intention itself is wrong, fits the warehouse well. Most picking errors I see are slips: someone hears the right number but their hand goes to the neighbouring bay. I have suggested to my shift manager that we log which errors happen after a two-quantity instruction, and we now keep a simple tally. It is not research, but it has made me more careful about separating what I observe from what I assume.

Outside work, two things keep me busy. I share an allotment plot with my aunt, which mainly involves arguing with slugs and learning patience with broad beans. I also run a team at our local pub quiz, which has taught me something about group recall: we answer better when one person writes and the others talk, rather than everyone offering guesses at once. I do not treat this as evidence of anything, though it is a pleasant reminder that cognition is social as well as individual.

I am looking for a programme that will strengthen my quantitative skills and give me supervised experience designing studies with real applications, whether in human factors, interface design or learning. I am especially interested in how auditory instructions load working memory, and in whether well-placed cues can reduce errors after interruptions. Shift work has made me reliable, organised and comfortable working independently, and my dissertation showed me that I enjoy the slow work of getting a design right. I would like to build on both, and I hope to develop research skills that I can take back into workplaces like the one I know.