MSc in Business Economics postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Every Monday at the furniture retailer where I work, I receive a spreadsheet of last week's sales and a list of items the regional managers want to mark down. My job is to check whether earlier discounts actually moved stock or simply gave away margin on sofas that would have sold anyway. After a year of doing this, I have become more interested in why the business makes these decisions the way it does than in the spreadsheets themselves, and I want to study business economics to understand them properly.

My undergraduate degree in economics at a Polish university gave me a solid grounding in microeconomics, econometrics and industrial organisation. The course I enjoyed most covered oligopoly models, because it was the first time theory seemed to describe something I could see on the street. That led to my bachelor's thesis, which looked at fuel prices at independent petrol stations along a stretch of road near a motorway junction. Over three months I recorded posted prices at eleven stations twice a week, partly on my bicycle and partly from a public price-comparison website, and compared stations that faced a nearby competitor with those that did not. The sample was small and I could not observe costs, so my conclusions were modest: isolated stations appeared to adjust prices more slowly when wholesale prices fell, which is consistent with the idea of asymmetric price adjustment, but I could not rule out other explanations. My supervisor's main criticism was that I had not thought carefully enough about why some stations were isolated in the first place, and working through that question taught me more about identification than any lecture had.

At work, the analysis is simpler but the stakes are more immediate. I built a small model in Excel that compares sales during a discount period with the same weeks in the previous year, adjusted for overall store traffic. It is not sophisticated, but it showed that discounts on dining tables brought in customers who also bought chairs, while discounts on bedroom wardrobes mostly brought sales forward from the following month. The category manager now asks for this comparison before agreeing to markdowns. Explaining results to people who care about stock levels rather than standard errors has made me better at saying clearly what a number does and does not show.

Outside work, I help my parents with their allotment, which has its own small economy of swapped seedlings, shared tools and arguments about whose turn it is to water. I also play in a recreational volleyball league and keep its fixtures and fee records, which is less glamorous than it sounds but means I am trusted with other people's money and time.

I am now reading more widely to prepare for postgraduate study. Jean Tirole's The Theory of Industrial Organization has been demanding, and I have worked slowly through the chapters on price discrimination and product differentiation, which connect directly to the markdown decisions I see each week. I have also been refreshing my programming, moving from Excel towards R so that I can handle larger datasets and run regressions I could only approximate before.

At master's level I hope to deepen my understanding of firm strategy, pricing and competition, and to gain stronger empirical methods for questions where data is messy and causation is hard to establish. In the longer term I would like to work in pricing or competition analysis, either inside a company or for an organisation that studies how markets behave. I bring a sound economics background, practical experience of applying it to real commercial decisions, and the habit of asking whether a result would survive a closer look. I would welcome the chance to build on these with more rigorous training.