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

Personal statement example

At the small accounting practice where I work, the end of each month means sorting invoices from about forty clients, most of them spaza shops, hair salons and panel beaters. Two years ago I noticed that several clients' diesel receipts rose and fell almost exactly with the published load-shedding schedule, while their recorded trading days barely changed. That pattern did not prove anything on its own, but it sharpened a question I had begun asking in my undergraduate degree: how do very small firms absorb shocks that larger firms can insure against, and what does that cost them over time?

My BCom in Economics gave me a solid grounding in microeconomic theory, econometrics and development economics. In my final year I wrote a research essay examining whether scheduled power cuts were associated with shorter opening hours among informal retailers. Using publicly available survey data, I constructed a measure of exposure based on reported outage frequency and estimated its relationship with weekly trading hours, controlling for location and business type. The results suggested a modest negative association, but the most useful part of the project was learning its limits. Exposure was self-reported, firms that closed entirely disappeared from the sample, and I could not separate the effect of outages from the general economic slowdown of the same period. My supervisor encouraged me to write a section setting out what better data would be needed, and drafting it showed me how much I wanted to study identification strategies properly.

Since graduating I have worked as a bookkeeper's assistant. The job is not research, but it has taught me things a dataset cannot. I reconcile bank statements, prepare VAT schedules and chase missing slips, and I have seen how irregular record-keeping shapes what any survey of small firms can actually measure. A salon owner who pays a supplier partly in cash and partly by bank transfer will report her costs honestly but inconsistently. Understanding that has made me more careful about measurement error, and more interested in how researchers combine administrative records with surveys. I have also become the person in the office who builds the spreadsheet templates, which led me to teach myself R in the evenings so that I could check client trends more quickly than by hand.

Outside work, my reading has moved from textbooks towards the empirical literature. Banerjee and Duflo's Poor Economics interested me less for its conclusions than for its insistence on looking closely at how people make decisions under constraint, and Angrist and Pischke's Mostly Harmless Econometrics gave me a clearer sense of why instrumental variables and difference-in-differences designs matter for questions like mine. I have worked through its examples alongside my own code, which has been slow but satisfying.

My life outside economics is fairly ordinary. I sing tenor in a church choir, which requires weekly rehearsal and a tolerance for being told to start again from bar twelve. On Sundays I look after my grandmother so that my aunt can rest, which mostly means cooking, sorting her medication box and listening to her stories about running a dressmaking business from her lounge in the 1980s. Those stories are not evidence, but they remind me that informal enterprise has a long history that rarely appears in official statistics.

I am applying for a coursework and dissertation master's because I want both parts. I need rigorous training in advanced microeconomics and econometrics before I can answer the questions I care about, and I want the discipline of a substantial dissertation to test whether I can carry a research design from proposal to defensible result. I would like to return to small-firm resilience, perhaps examining how energy or credit shocks affect survival rather than only hours. I bring reliable work habits, practical familiarity with how small businesses keep their books, and a realistic sense of how much I still have to learn.