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

Personal statement example

The repairer I spent most time with during my Honours fieldwork kept a school exercise book under his counter. Each line held a date, a phone model, a fault and a first name, and sometimes a second note in pencil: 'owes R50', 'cousin of Thabo', 'bring back Friday'. Over six weeks at a cluster of cellphone repair stalls near Bellville station, I came to see that book as a record of relationships as much as of broken screens. I would like to develop that research into a Master's dissertation on repair, credit and trust in informal technology economies.

My Honours project grew from coursework on economic anthropology. Reading Arjun Appadurai's edited volume The Social Life of Things, especially Igor Kopytoff's chapter on the cultural biography of objects, gave me a way to ask what happens to a phone after it leaves the shop. Steven Jackson's essay on 'broken world thinking' pushed me further, because it treats repair as a site where knowledge and care are produced rather than as an afterthought to manufacture. I wanted to test these ideas against a place I knew from commuting.

The fieldwork was modest in scale. With ethical clearance and the permission of three stall owners, I spent two mornings a week observing, helping to sort spare parts when asked, and conducting eleven semi-structured interviews with repairers and customers. I learned quickly that my first interview guide was too formal; people answered more freely while working, so I shifted to conversations at the counter and wrote fuller notes afterwards on the train. My central finding was that repairers extended informal credit mainly through chains of introduction, and that the exercise book worked as a shared memory that customers sometimes asked to see. The project received a strong mark, and my supervisor encouraged me to think about whether these patterns hold across different kinds of repair.

That is the question I hope to pursue at Master's level. I would like to compare phone repair with one other trade, possibly appliance or shoe repair, to see whether credit depends on the object's value, the repairer's reputation, or the density of local networks. I also want to look more closely at how women repairers, of whom I met only one, build a customer base. I recognise this would require a longer and more careful period of fieldwork, and stronger grounding in the literature on informality and on gender and work, which I have started reading independently.

Since graduating I have worked full-time as an agent in an insurance call centre. The job is not glamorous, but it has taught me a great deal about listening. I handle claims for damaged devices, and I hear daily how people describe loss, blame and urgency. I have learned to stay patient through difficult calls and to keep accurate records under time pressure, both of which matter in fieldwork. I was recently asked to help train two new agents on our notes system, which I enjoyed because explaining a process forced me to understand it properly.

Outside work I coach an under-12 netball team at a community sports ground on Saturdays. It has nothing to do with anthropology, although I notice how the girls negotiate positions and friendships on the bench. Mainly it keeps me organised: I manage fixtures, lifts and a WhatsApp group of parents, and I have learned to be clear and consistent with people who all want slightly different things.

A dissertation-based Master's suits me because my strongest work so far has come from sustained time in one place and the slow process of writing it up. I am ready to commit to that independently, and I would value supervision that challenges my framing and helps me turn a good Honours project into a properly argued piece of ethnography.