Master of Arts (by coursework & dissertation) — Anthropology postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Most mornings during my honours year I stood near the fruit stalls at a minibus-taxi rank, notebook in my pocket, listening to how traders talked to commuters who were half-running for the next departure. A woman selling naartjies would call out prices, but she also called out destinations, which taxis were filling fastest and when a marshal was about to close a door. I had expected to study selling. What I found was a small economy of information, and that is the thread I would like to follow at master's level.

My undergraduate degree combined anthropology and sociology. The courses that held me most were those on economic anthropology and urban life, where I first read Marcel Mauss's The Gift and began thinking about exchange as something that creates obligations rather than simply ending in a transaction. Later, reading Keith Hart's work on the informal economy helped me see that 'informal' describes an official viewpoint more than the activity itself. I was encouraged to treat these ideas as tools to test rather than labels to apply.

My honours research project looked at six traders at one rank over eight weeks. With ethics approval and verbal consent, I conducted short, repeated conversations and kept a field diary of who spoke to whom and when. The most useful method turned out to be the simplest: returning at the same times each week so that people stopped treating me as a visitor. By the fifth week one trader, a man selling airtime and phone chargers, began explaining which marshals he trusted and why he extended credit to some regular commuters but not others. My argument was modest: that traders' small acts of information-sharing helped secure their place in a crowded space where they had no formal right to stand. My supervisor pointed out that I had relied too heavily on the most talkative participants, and I now think a longer project would need a deliberate strategy for hearing quieter voices.

Alongside my studies I have worked part-time as a till assistant in a community pharmacy for three years. It is ordinary work, but it has sharpened skills I value in fieldwork. I have learned to be patient with people who are anxious or in a hurry, to explain the same thing clearly several times, and to keep confidential what customers tell me. I also notice how regulars build relationships with particular staff members, choosing which queue to join depending on who is serving, which reminded me of the commuters at the rank.

Outside work I help organise the rota for my church choir, which means keeping track of forty people's availability and handling the occasional disagreement about who sings at which service. I also take street photographs as a hobby. Photography has made me more careful about representation: I no longer photograph people without asking, and I have become interested in debates about the ethics of visual methods in anthropology.

For a dissertation, I would like to return to transport spaces, perhaps examining how credit and trust operate between traders, drivers and commuters, and whether mobile payments are changing those relationships. I am open to refining this through coursework, particularly in research design and anthropological theory, where I know my reading is still uneven. I would especially like to strengthen my understanding of the literature on urban Africa and on ethnographic writing, since I found that writing up my honours project was harder than gathering material.

I am applying because I want structured training that pushes me beyond the descriptive work I have done so far. I am a reliable, curious researcher who listens well and returns to the same place often enough to understand it. A master's degree would give me the theoretical depth and methodological discipline to turn that habit into stronger scholarship.