Master in Business and Finance (MRes) postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

At the builders' merchant where I work as an accounts payable clerk, some suppliers offer a two per cent discount if we pay within ten days rather than thirty. When I started, we took these discounts whenever cash allowed, almost by habit. Working out the implied annual return of skipping one, roughly thirty-six per cent, made me realise that a routine payment decision is really a short-term financing choice, and that firms make such choices with very uneven information. That gap between textbook corporate finance and the way decisions are actually made is why I want to train as a researcher through an MRes in business and finance.

My undergraduate degree in accounting and finance gave me a solid base. I enjoyed financial reporting more than I expected, because it showed me how much judgement sits behind numbers that look objective. Empirical finance was the module that changed my plans. We replicated simple event studies, and I was struck by how sensitive results were to choices about estimation windows and benchmark models.

That interest became my dissertation, which examined whether post-earnings-announcement drift, the tendency for prices to keep moving in the direction of an earnings surprise, appeared among FTSE 250 companies between 2015 and 2022. I built the dataset from analyst forecasts and price data available through the university's databases, cleaned it in Python and estimated abnormal returns using market-adjusted and factor-based benchmarks. I found some evidence of drift after negative surprises, but it weakened considerably once I accounted for firm size and trading costs, and I was careful not to overstate it. The most useful part was learning how many small decisions, such as handling missing forecasts or overlapping announcements, shape a conclusion. I also came away aware of my limits: I could run regressions confidently but understood the econometric theory behind panel methods only partly. A research master's appeals to me precisely because it would fill that gap rigorously before I consider doctoral study.

My job has developed different strengths. I reconcile supplier statements, chase discrepancies and prepare a weekly cash-out forecast for the finance manager. After noticing that late invoice approvals were costing us discounts, I built a spreadsheet tracking approval times by branch. It was not sophisticated, but it led to a simple reminder system and fewer missed deadlines. More importantly, it taught me to ask why a pattern exists before proposing a fix, and to explain findings clearly to colleagues who are busy and sceptical of spreadsheets.

Outside work, I help coordinate the volunteer rota for my local parkrun, which means filling roughly twenty roles every Saturday and finding cover when people drop out on Friday evenings. It is unglamorous but has made me reliable and organised. I have also been learning Spanish for eighteen months through evening classes and conversation exchanges. I can now hold everyday conversations and read news articles slowly, and I am keen to keep improving through living and studying in Spain.

Academically, I have prepared by working through an introductory econometrics textbook alongside my job, focusing on instrumental variables and panel data, and by revising linear algebra and probability, which I know a research programme will demand at a higher level. I have also read about the debate over market efficiency, including Eugene Fama's distinction between weak, semi-strong and strong forms, which helped me frame my dissertation question more precisely.

The areas I most want to explore are corporate finance and the interaction between firms' financing decisions and frictions such as information asymmetry and working capital constraints. My hope is to develop the theoretical grounding and methodological discipline to study questions like the ones I meet at work, with data and care rather than intuition. I would bring a strong quantitative undergraduate record, practical familiarity with how finance functions operate, and the patience to do careful, often repetitive, work properly.