Master of Arts (by dissertation) — Greek Language & Literature postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Somewhere around line 448 of Works and Days, Hesiod tells his brother Perses to listen for the voice of the crane calling from the clouds, because it signals the time for ploughing. I first read the passage in my second year, slowly and with a dictionary open. A few months later I heard blue cranes over a wheat field near Caledon on a walk with the birding club I belong to. The coincidence was not a revelation, but it changed how I read the poem. I stopped treating the calendar sections as a farming manual tacked onto the moral argument and started asking how Hesiod makes the natural world speak with authority.

That question became my Honours research essay, which examined how the poem moves between direct commands to Perses and the seasonal signs of stars, birds and plants. I worked through the Greek of the central sections and paid close attention to the imperatives and to the shifts between second-person address and general statements about what 'a man' should do. M. L. West's commentary was indispensable, and my supervisor pushed me to read his notes critically rather than as final answers. My argument was modest. I suggested that the rising of the Pleiades, the crane's call and the snail climbing the plants are presented as instructions in their own right, and that this lets Hesiod claim a source of guidance beyond his own quarrel with his brother. The essay earned a first-class mark. More usefully, it showed me where my argument was thin. I had relied on the poem alone and had not compared other early hexameter poetry or the wider tradition of Near Eastern wisdom literature that scholars often set beside Hesiod.

A dissertation would let me address those gaps. I would like to study the language of instruction across Works and Days more systematically, including how commands, prohibitions and proverbial statements are distributed. I also want to set this alongside the didactic elements in Homeric speeches, such as the advice older figures give to younger warriors. I expect the project to change as I read further. Its core would be close philological work on the Greek, which is the part of my studies I enjoy most.

My preparation is grounded in steady language study. Over three years I read set texts that included Plato's Crito, Euripides' Medea and parts of Iliad 6. I also took prose composition, which taught me more about Greek syntax than any amount of reading. Since graduating I have tutored first-year Greek students twice a week. Explaining the aorist or the uses of the genitive to someone meeting them for the first time has made my own grammar more precise. It has also made me patient with the way understanding builds up one paradigm at a time.

On weekends I work as a barista at a busy café. The job has nothing to do with Hesiod, but it has given me practice in managing my time and staying calm when the orders stack up. It also gives me a reliable rhythm. I have learnt that I work best when the week has structure: language revision in the mornings, reading in the afternoons, shifts at the weekend. I would bring that habit to independent research, where nobody sets the pace but me.

The birding club has stayed with me as well. Keeping a field notebook taught me to record what I actually see rather than what I expect to see, which is not a bad discipline for reading an archaic text. I would like the chance to spend the next stage of my studies looking that carefully at Hesiod's Greek and working out what his instructions were meant to do.