Master of Philosophy (by coursework & dissertation) — Philosophy, Politics & Economics postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My aunt's stokvel keeps its rules in a blue exercise book. There are eleven of them, written in three different hands over about fifteen years. Rule four says a member who misses a contribution must explain herself at the next meeting. Rule nine, added later and squeezed into the margin, says the group may lend the month's payout to a member facing a funeral, but only by a two-thirds show of hands. For the past three years I have kept the group's accounts. I record contributions, reconcile them with the bank statement and read the totals aloud at meetings. I started because my aunt dislikes spreadsheets. The book is the reason I want to study philosophy, politics and economics together at postgraduate level.

My undergraduate degree combined philosophy and economics, and for most of it the two subjects seemed to describe different worlds. In economics I learned to model saving as an individual choice under constraints. In philosophy I spent a semester on Hume's account of promising in the Treatise, where obligation rests on a convention that becomes useful once people see that others will keep it too. I noticed that the stokvel looked more like Hume's picture than like the models in my economics notes. Nobody in the group could be sued for defaulting. What kept twelve women paying, month after month, was a set of expectations that the members had written down themselves and could change.

For my honours research essay I tried to test this more carefully. I used Elinor Ostrom's Governing the Commons, and in particular her design principles for long-lasting self-governing institutions, such as graduated sanctions, monitoring by members and arrangements that let those affected by a rule take part in changing it. I interviewed members of four savings groups in my area, with their consent and with names removed, and compared their rules against Ostrom's list. Several principles fitted well. Rule four is a mild, graduated sanction, and the funeral clause shows members amending their own arrangements. The most interesting part of the essay was where the fit broke down. A rotating savings group is not a common-pool resource in Ostrom's sense, because the money is not depleted by use in the way a fishery is. I argued that the principles still carry over, because they are really about sustaining trust among people who depend on each other, but my supervisor pushed me on whether I had stretched the framework too far. I am not sure I fully answered her, and that is a question I would like to take further.

Since graduating I have worked as an accounts clerk at a hardware store, handling supplier invoices and the credit accounts of small builders. The work is not academic, but it has taught me how informal credit actually runs. Many customers settle when a job pays rather than on the invoice date, and the store tolerates this because the relationships are worth more than strict terms. I have become quicker and more accurate with figures, and more patient with records that do not reconcile on the first attempt.

Outside work I play club netball on Saturdays and help organise our fixture list, which is its own small exercise in negotiating rules everyone can accept.

I want to spend the coming years working out how normative questions about fairness and obligation can be held alongside empirical work on how institutions behave. I am particularly interested in whether informal financial arrangements deserve recognition in policy, or whether formalising them would weaken the trust they depend on. I bring an honours project I can build on, practical experience of keeping careful records, and a habit of asking where a theory stops fitting the case in front of me.