Music Therapy, MM postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

The hello song in Class 4 lasts about ninety seconds. I sing each pupil's name, sign it in Makaton, and wait. For most of the autumn term, one boy in the class answered by turning his head away, so I began leaving a longer gap after his name and tapping the rhythm of it on the table. In February he tapped it back. Moments like that are why I am applying for postgraduate training in music therapy: I want to understand properly what is happening in those exchanges, and to learn to work with them safely and deliberately rather than by instinct.

I studied for a BMus with piano and voice as my principal studies, graduating with a 2:1. My dissertation looked at how a volunteer community choir coordinated breathing and phrasing without a conductor during warm-ups. I recorded six rehearsals with the members' consent, transcribed sections of them, and compared where singers adjusted their timing to one another. The findings were modest, because one choir and six sessions cannot support broad claims, but the project taught me to listen to group music-making as interaction rather than performance. It also taught me practical things: how to ask for consent clearly, how to store recordings carefully, and how to write about real people without overstating what I had observed.

For the past two years I have worked as a teaching assistant in a special school for children aged seven to eleven with severe learning difficulties and autism. My role is support, not therapy. I help with personal care, follow pupils' communication plans and work alongside speech and language therapists when they visit. I have learned how much depends on routine, on reading small signals of distress, and on recording what I see accurately for the class teacher. Because I am the staff member who plays the keyboard, I now lead short song sessions at the start and end of the day, adapted from songs the speech and language therapist suggested. I have been careful to see these as structured classroom activities, but they have made me curious about the clinical reasoning behind the choices a qualified music therapist would make.

To understand that reasoning better, I have read widely beyond my degree. Oliver Sacks's Musicophilia gave me an accessible introduction to how music can remain available to people with neurological conditions, and I have read introductory texts on improvisational approaches and on the importance of the therapeutic relationship. I found the distinction between using music as a tool and using it as the medium of a relationship especially useful, because it made me question some of my own habits, such as filling silences too quickly.

On alternate Saturdays I volunteer at a dementia café run by a local charity, accompanying a singalong of songs requested by the guests. I prepare a folder of chords in comfortable keys and have learned to slow down when someone joins in late. One regular, who rarely speaks during the morning, sings every verse of one particular song and afterwards often talks about the dance halls she went to. I cannot know exactly why that happens, and I am wary of reading too much into it, but it has shown me that music work with older adults can be as rich as work with children.

Outside work I play fiddle and keyboard in a ceilidh band at weddings and village halls. It is purely for fun, but calling dances for beginners has made me quick at judging a room and adjusting tempo to people's confidence.

I am ready for the demands of clinical placements, supervision and reflective practice, and I want the rigorous grounding in theory, research and ethics that postgraduate study provides. I bring sound musicianship, two years of patient work with disabled children and a habit of careful observation, and I am keen to turn these into professional skill.