Master of Business postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Behind the counter of the independent bakery where I work, there is a whiteboard listing every café that buys our bread wholesale, with tomorrow's quantities written in marker. When I started, the owner updated it from text messages late each evening, and roughly once a fortnight a café received sourdough it had not ordered or missed the rolls it had. After a year of taking those calls, I suggested a shared online form with a fixed cut-off time. Two cafés refused to use it, so the whiteboard stayed alongside the form, but errors became rare enough that the owner now trusts me to reconcile orders on the evenings she is not in. That small change, and the reasons some customers resisted it, is close to the question I want to study at postgraduate level: why small firms adopt, adapt or ignore tools that look obviously useful from outside.

I first approached this from sociology rather than business. For my undergraduate dissertation I interviewed eleven traders at a covered market about when and why they began accepting card payments. I expected cost to dominate their answers. Instead, several described the decision in terms of their regular customers, their pride in handling cash accurately, or a neighbouring stall's experience with a faulty reader. One fishmonger had bought a reader and kept it in a drawer for months. Coding the transcripts taught me how to keep my expectations from shaping the categories, and writing up eleven conversations honestly, without overstating what they could show, made me aware of the limits of a small qualitative study. I would like to develop the quantitative and theoretical grounding I lacked then, so that I can place observations like these within research on innovation adoption and small business management rather than describing them in isolation.

My reading since graduating has been led by that gap. Everett Rogers's Diffusion of Innovations gave me useful vocabulary, particularly the idea that perceived compatibility with existing practices affects adoption, which fitted my fishmonger better than any price comparison. I have also worked through an introductory accounting course online because I realised I could describe the bakery's margins only vaguely. Being able to read its simple profit and loss statement has changed how I think about wholesale pricing, since our cheapest loaves to cafés barely cover flour and labour once delivery is counted.

Outside work, I coordinate a seed swap at my allotment site each spring. It involves collecting donated seed, labelling packets, booking the community hall and persuading forty or so plot-holders to bring what they promised. None of it is glamorous, but it has made me practised at organising volunteers who owe me nothing, and at keeping records clear enough for someone else to take over. I also boulder twice a week at a local wall, which has little to do with business except that working on the same problem over several sessions has made me patient with slow progress.

I am applying for a Master of Business because I want structured training in research design and business theory, and the chance to complete a substantial independent project on how small enterprises make operational decisions. I bring experience of interviewing, careful handling of qualitative evidence, and daily familiarity with the practical pressures of a small firm, from cash flow to customers who prefer the whiteboard. I am realistic that a sociology degree leaves gaps in finance and economics, and I am already working to close them. I hope to use postgraduate study to turn questions I have noticed at work into research that is rigorous and useful to the people running such businesses.