Religious studies personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

The lunch club where I volunteer is run from a Methodist church hall, and the people who come through the door on a Tuesday include a retired Catholic nurse, two Muslim brothers who own the barber's, and a man who tells me firmly every week that he believes in nothing at all. Listening to them talk about fasting, funerals, luck and worry made me realise how much of ordinary life is organised around religious ideas, including for people who would not describe themselves as religious. I wanted to understand that properly rather than collecting anecdotes.

Studying Religious Studies at A level in the evenings has shown me that the questions I was circling already have a long history and careful vocabulary. I found the unit on religious language genuinely difficult and therefore worth pursuing: the idea that statements about God might be doing something other than describing a fact was unfamiliar to me, and I have gone back to it several times. Reading Durkheim's account of religion as something that binds a group together fitted uncomfortably well with what I see at the lunch club, but it also seemed to leave out what individuals actually believe is happening when they pray.

I want a degree that takes both textual study and lived practice seriously, so that I can read scripture and commentary with some skill while also studying how communities actually behave. I am particularly keen to learn a scriptural language and to study traditions beyond the ones I know, especially Hindu and Buddhist thought, where my knowledge is thin and mostly secondhand. After eleven years in retail I am returning to study deliberately, with a clear sense of what I find interesting and a habit of finishing what I start.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

I am studying an Access to Higher Education Diploma in Humanities at my local college, which covers history, English literature, sociology and academic study skills. The sociology units have been the most useful preparation: I wrote an assignment on secularisation in Britain, which forced me to distinguish between falling church attendance and any straightforward decline in belief, and taught me to treat survey data carefully rather than quoting the headline figure. The essay-writing units have also rebuilt skills I had not used since school, particularly referencing and constructing a paragraph that argues rather than describes.

Alongside the Access course I am taking A-level Religious Studies at evening class, covering philosophy of religion, ethics and the study of Christianity. I have written on the problem of evil and on Natural Law, and I am currently working on Kant's account of duty, which I find clearer to explain than to accept. My tutor encourages us to read primary material where we can, so I have worked through sections of Boethius on providence and some of Aquinas in translation, slowly and with a dictionary open.

My earlier qualifications are GCSEs, including English and Maths. Returning to formal study in my thirties has meant learning to read academically again: annotating, summarising an argument in my own words before responding to it, and accepting that a first reading of a philosophical text will not be enough. I keep a notebook of terms and thinkers, partly because I have no background to fall back on and partly because writing things out is how I remember them. Balancing coursework with shift patterns has made me organised out of necessity rather than temperament.

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

For eleven years I have worked at a garden centre, the last four running the plant ordering desk. I place orders with nurseries, track what sells, and deal with customers who are disappointed, mistaken or occasionally both. That work has given me patience and the ability to explain something clearly to someone who does not want to hear it, which I expect to be useful in seminars where people disagree in good faith. I also trained two new starters on the ordering system, which taught me how much I understood only once I had to set it out step by step.

At the lunch club I help with food, washing up and lifts. Over three years I have learned to listen without steering the conversation, and to notice when someone wants to talk about a bereavement rather than the weather. The volunteers come from several denominations and one from none, and our conversations about why we turn up have been more instructive than anything I could have arranged deliberately.

Outside work I read steadily. I have found Karen Armstrong helpful as an introduction and then frustrating in its broad strokes, which sent me looking for more specific studies; a book on the history of English parish churches gave me a better sense of how doctrine and local politics interact than any summary had. I visit churches and, last year, a mosque open day in a nearby city, where the guide's explanation of the calligraphy made me think harder about images and their absence.

I grow vegetables on a small allotment plot and swim at the local pool twice a week, both of which keep me sane during essay deadlines. I am ready for the demands of a degree and looking forward to studying this subject in depth rather than in snatched evenings.

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