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

Personal statement example

For two years the fare table painted on the wall at my local taxi rank changed more often than the paint could keep up with. Drivers chalked new prices over old ones, and by my final undergraduate year I had started photographing the wall each month. Those photographs became the starting point for my honours research project, and the question behind them is the one I would like to pursue at greater depth through a Master of Arts by dissertation in Economics: how do households on low and irregular incomes absorb rising transport costs, and what do they give up to do so?

My undergraduate degree combined economics with statistics. I enjoyed microeconomic theory most when it had to meet messy evidence, and a module on applied econometrics taught me to treat a regression as an argument that needs defending rather than a result to be reported. For my honours project I used publicly available household survey data to examine whether households further from their place of work spent a larger share of income on transport after fuel price increases, and whether that showed up as reduced spending on food. Matching survey waves, cleaning inconsistent location codes and deciding how to handle households with no recorded commute took far longer than the estimation itself. My results suggested a modest but consistent shift in spending shares for the lowest income groups, though I was careful to note that I could not separate the effect of fares from changes in employment over the same period. My supervisor encouraged me to think about panel methods and better identification, which is part of why I want to return to the topic with more time and stronger tools.

Since graduating I have worked as a query clerk in a municipal water-billing office. Most of my day is spent explaining bills, logging disputes and checking meter readings against account histories. It is not glamorous work, but it has taught me a great deal about how people actually manage household costs. Residents often prioritise one bill over another depending on which service can be cut off first, and I have seen how small arrears grow when income arrives weekly but accounts are billed monthly. I have also become more comfortable working with large, imperfect administrative records, and with explaining numbers clearly to people who are understandably frustrated.

Outside work, I coach an under-12 netball team on Saturday mornings. Organising lifts to away matches has, unexpectedly, given me another view of transport costs: parents share cars and split petrol in ways that look a lot like informal insurance. I also help my younger brother with his matric mathematics most evenings, which has sharpened my own understanding of basics I once rushed through.

I have kept reading since leaving university. Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo's Poor Economics influenced how I think about the trade-offs households make under constraint, and I have been working through introductory material on difference-in-differences and fixed-effects models in R, replicating simple published examples to check my understanding.

A dissertation-based master's suits me because my strongest work has come from sustained engagement with a single question and its data. I would like to extend my honours project by examining commuting costs, location and household spending over time, ideally using panel data so that I can address some of the weaknesses in my earlier design. I expect to need guidance on methods and on framing a contribution to the existing literature, and I would welcome close supervision. What I can bring is persistence with difficult data, practical experience of how households handle bills, and a research question that has held my attention for several years.