Philosophy, politics and economics postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Last year a leaflet came through my parents' door asking residents to choose between two versions of our local bus network. Option A kept the hourly service to the estates on the edge of town. Option B ran buses every twelve minutes along the busy central corridor and cut the outer routes. The leaflet gave journey times and costs, but it never said whose time counted for more, or why. I filled it in, then spent an evening trying to work out what a fair answer would look like. That question, which combines evidence, value judgement and political process, is the reason I want to study philosophy, politics and economics at postgraduate level.

My undergraduate degree in Philosophy and Politics gave me a solid grounding in normative theory. I enjoyed political philosophy most, particularly the debate between Rawls's difference principle and luck egalitarian positions, and Elizabeth Anderson's argument in "What Is the Point of Equality?" that equality should concern social relationships rather than compensating people for bad luck. My dissertation applied these ideas to housing allocation. Many English councils place applicants in priority bands based on need, and some add credit for time spent waiting or for local connection. I asked whether waiting time can be justified as a form of desert, or whether it simply rewards people who were able to apply early. I argued that it has some legitimacy as a way of making the system predictable and trusted, but that it should not outweigh urgent need. I received a first for the dissertation, and my supervisor's main criticism has stayed with me: I had treated the shortage of housing as fixed, when the economics of supply shapes which moral trade-offs arise at all.

That gap is what I most want to close. During my degree I took the one introductory economics option open to me and have since worked through an intermediate microeconomics textbook on my own, focusing on welfare economics and public goods. I found Amartya Sen's capability approach helpful because it connects economic measurement with philosophical questions about what makes a life go well. I want the formal training to evaluate policy properly rather than argue only from principle.

Since graduating I have worked as an administrative assistant in a council housing options team. I process applications, check documents and update case records. I have no role in deciding priority, but I see how rules designed in the abstract operate in practice. Applicants are often confused by the banding criteria, and small administrative requirements, such as proof of address from a particular date, can matter as much as the formal policy. I redesigned our checklist for supporting documents after noticing that the same items were repeatedly missing. My manager adopted it, and the number of incomplete applications we have to return has fallen noticeably. This taught me that institutional design includes the forms as well as the principles.

Outside work I play in a weekly five-a-side league and help organise our team's subs and fixtures, which is mostly chasing people for payments and finding replacements at short notice. It is entirely unrelated to my studies, though it has made me patient and reasonably good at persuading people.

I would like a programme that requires me to hold philosophical argument, political analysis and economic reasoning together, because the problems I care about, such as allocating scarce public goods and designing fair procedures, cannot be answered by any one of them. I am particularly interested in developing a thesis on how distributive principles should be weighed against administrative feasibility. I bring careful writing, a habit of testing theory against practice, and a clear sense of the skills I still need to build.