Political and administrative science personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

Twelve years of paid work has taught me that the gap between a policy and its delivery is where most of the interesting questions live. In my job on a council revenues and benefits line, I explain decisions I did not make, using rules written elsewhere, to people whose circumstances rarely fit the categories on my screen. I have watched a single change to discretionary housing payment guidance alter the tone of every call for a fortnight. What I could not do from a headset was understand why the rules were shaped that way, who was accountable for them, or what alternatives were rejected. That is what I want to study. Political and administrative science appeals to me because it treats government as something that has to actually work, not only something that has to be argued about. I am interested in the machinery: how discretion is distributed down a hierarchy, why local and central responsibilities are divided as they are, and how performance targets change the behaviour of the people measured by them. Reading Michael Lipsky's idea of street-level bureaucracy gave me language for something I had felt for years, that the frontline worker's routine decisions become the policy as citizens experience it. I want the analytical and quantitative training to test claims like that properly, rather than relying on what I happen to have seen from one desk in one borough.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My A-levels in 2008 were respectable rather than strong, and I went into work instead of university, partly for money and partly because I had no clear sense of what I wanted to read. Returning through an Access to Higher Education Diploma in Humanities and Social Sciences was a deliberate test of whether I could study seriously again around shift work. Over two years of evening and weekend classes I earned Distinctions in most units, including Government and Politics, Sociology and Research Methods, with a Merit in Academic Writing after a shaky first assignment on referencing conventions. The research methods unit was the most useful. I designed a small questionnaire on how residents on my own street preferred to contact the council, learned quickly that my sample of twenty-two neighbours could support very modest conclusions, and wrote about sampling bias with more conviction than I would have managed in theory alone. My final extended project compared how two neighbouring authorities published their council tax support schemes, using their own committee papers and consultation documents. Reading minutes properly, and noticing what is recorded and what is merely resolved, was a skill I had to build. I have since worked through an introductory statistics textbook and started using spreadsheets for basic descriptive analysis so that quantitative modules are less of a jolt.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

Most of my evidence comes from ordinary work. As a senior adviser I handle escalated cases, draft the written explanations colleagues send when a decision is challenged, and sit in the monthly meeting where recurring complaints are reviewed. Summarising forty similar calls into a short note that a manager will actually read has made me economical in writing. I also trained four new starters, which meant explaining statutory rules to people encountering them for the first time and quickly discovering which of my own explanations were vague. For three years I have been secretary of our residents' association. I take the minutes, circulate the agenda and prepare the small annual accounts, and I have twice put together our response to a local planning consultation. That work involved reading the relevant policy documents closely, finding which material considerations could reasonably be raised, and persuading neighbours that a submission citing policy would carry more weight than one expressing annoyance. One application was refused and one approved, and comparing the officers' reports on each taught me a good deal about how reasoning is set out in practice. Outside this I play netball on Thursdays, which keeps my week structured, and I have been reading around British local government history in the evenings. As a mature student with a mortgage I have arranged my finances and hours carefully, and I am used to protecting study time.

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