Master Arts, Literature and Media (research) (MA) postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

On Thursday evenings at the independent cinema where I work, I build the next week's programme: trailers, adverts and the feature, assembled into a playlist on the projection server. Because our audience includes regular viewers of captioned screenings, I check the subtitle files before each one, and I have become oddly attentive to what they leave out. A caption that renders a Glaswegian character's speech as standard English is not wrong, exactly, but it changes who that character is on screen. That small, repeated observation shaped my undergraduate dissertation and is the reason I want to pursue research-focused postgraduate study in literature and media.

I studied English and Film Studies, graduating with a 2:1. My dissertation examined how dialect is handled in English-language subtitles for British social-realist films, comparing the official subtitle tracks for two Ken Loach films with the dialogue as spoken. I transcribed selected scenes myself and categorised each departure: omission, standardisation, or retention of non-standard spelling. The method was modest, but it taught me how much careful close attention to a single feature can reveal. I found that the tracks I studied tended to keep regional vocabulary while flattening grammar, which raised questions I could not answer within ten thousand words, particularly about who makes these decisions and for which audiences. My supervisor encouraged me to frame those questions more theoretically, and reading Lawrence Venuti's distinction between domesticating and foreignising translation gave me a vocabulary for them, although I came to think subtitling, with its strict limits on space and reading speed, complicates his framework in useful ways.

Other modules mattered as much. A course on Victorian serial fiction made me think about how format shapes reading, from monthly instalments to the cliffhangers they encouraged, and I enjoyed tracing that logic forward into television. Studying narrative theory, especially Gérard Genette's account of paratexts, helped me see trailers, posters and even subtitle tracks as thresholds that frame a work before and while we encounter it. I want a programme that allows me to bring literary and media analysis together rather than treat them as separate fields.

My job has given me practical understanding that complements this reading. As a front-of-house supervisor I organise rotas for six staff, handle the box office reconciliation at the end of each shift, and run the monthly relaxed screenings, which means liaising with a local autism support group about lighting and sound levels. None of this is research, but it has made me organised and comfortable explaining decisions to people with different needs, and it keeps me close to how audiences actually watch films.

Outside work, I volunteer for a talking-newspaper charity, recording local news and features for blind and partially sighted listeners. Reading aloud for an audience who cannot see the page has made me think about what a text loses and gains in another medium, which links back to my academic interests more than I expected. I also swim three mornings a week, a routine that has helped me keep steady habits while working irregular cinema hours.

At postgraduate level I would like to extend my dissertation into a broader study of accessibility formats, including audio description and captioning, as forms of adaptation in their own right. I am particularly interested in how these formats encode assumptions about a 'standard' viewer and about which voices need translating. A research-oriented master's would give me the methodological training I currently lack, especially in archival and comparative approaches, and the chance to test whether this could become a doctoral project. I am ready for the independence that research demands, and I bring the persistence of someone who has spent many evenings checking timecodes line by line.