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

Personal statement example

In a minibus taxi from Mitchells Plain to Wynberg, the money moves before anyone says a word. Coins are passed forward from the back row, change comes back the same way, and the person nearest the driver often counts for strangers without being asked. I took that journey most mornings during my undergraduate years, and in my Honours year it became the subject of my research project: how commuters negotiate trust, obligation and small disputes in a space with no formal rules but a great deal of shared expectation.

I completed a Bachelor of Social Science in Sociology and Linguistics, followed by an Honours year in Sociology. My project drew on fourteen semi-structured interviews with regular commuters on two routes, alongside notes I kept on my own journeys over six weeks. I was interested in who takes on the job of counting fares and why. Several women I spoke to described doing it because they did not trust others to get it right, while some younger men said they avoided the front seat precisely to escape the responsibility. Reading Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life helped me think about the front seat as a kind of stage, where competence and fairness are performed for an audience of passengers. I also found that Goffman's framework did not account easily for the economic pressure behind these exchanges, since a short-changed fare can matter a great deal to someone earning little. That gap is one of the reasons I want to continue at Master's level.

The project taught me practical things that coursework had only described. Recruiting participants was slower than I expected, and I learned to explain my research in plain terms at taxi ranks rather than leading with ethics forms. Transcribing interviews that moved between English, Afrikaans and Kaaps made my linguistics training unexpectedly useful, because I could notice when people switched language to signal a joke or a complaint. My supervisor encouraged me to treat those switches as data rather than noise, and that shaped the final chapter.

Alongside my studies I have worked weekend shifts at a pharmacy till for three years. It is ordinary work, but it has given me steady practice in dealing calmly with people who are anxious or frustrated, often about the cost of medication. I have also become responsible for opening and cashing up, which requires accuracy and the trust of the pharmacist in charge.

On Wednesday evenings I help run a soup kitchen at my church. My role is mostly logistical: keeping a rota of volunteers, tracking donations and making sure we do not run short before the end of the month. I do not treat it as research, and I am careful not to view the people we serve as subjects. It has, though, made me more alert to how dignity is protected in small ways, such as letting people choose their own portions, which connects to the questions about informal fairness that interest me.

I also play chess at a local club, which has little to do with sociology but has made me more patient with problems that take time to resolve.

At Master's level I would like to develop my Honours work into a broader study of informal economic cooperation in Cape Town, possibly comparing taxi commuting with stokvels or neighbourhood lending arrangements. I want stronger training in qualitative methods and in theories of the informal economy, and the discipline of a longer dissertation. I am realistic that my Honours project was small, but it showed me that I can design a study, sustain it and write it up carefully. I would bring that experience, my bilingual fieldwork skills and a steady working habit to a coursework and dissertation programme.