Strategic studies postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My degree in History and Politics taught me to be suspicious of tidy explanations, and strategy is full of them. For my dissertation I compared how the 1966 and 1975 British defence reviews were presented to Parliament, reading Hansard debates alongside the published statements. What struck me was how rarely the arguments were about force levels as such. They were about commitments east of Suez, about the pound, about what the country believed it was for. The military balance was the part everyone could count, so it dominated the debate, while the harder questions about purpose were settled almost in passing. That gap between measurable means and contested ends is what draws me to strategic studies as a formal field of study rather than an interest I read around.

My reading since graduating has been deliberately broad. Clausewitz was hard going the first time and much more useful the second, particularly the insistence that war is a continuation of political intercourse by other means rather than a separate sphere with its own logic. Thomas Schelling's work on bargaining and commitment gave me a vocabulary for something I had noticed but could not name: that threats work through expectations, and that a state's reputation for following through can matter more than the capability itself. I have also read Lawrence Freedman on the difficulty of defining strategy at all, and Beatrice Heuser's survey of how the word has shifted meaning over two centuries. Reading these alongside current commentary on European rearmament has made me want structured supervision. I can follow an argument, but I am not yet confident distinguishing a genuine theoretical disagreement from a difference in terminology, and I would like to learn the historiography properly rather than assembling it piecemeal from footnotes.

My work has been useful preparation in less obvious ways. I have spent two years in a council licensing team, handling applications, objections and appeals. Much of the job is explaining why a decision was reached to someone who dislikes it, and drafting notes that will still make sense to a colleague in eight months. I have learned to write for people who are busy and sceptical, to keep a clear record of what was known at the time a decision was taken, and to spot when a policy is being applied because it is written down rather than because it fits the case. I have also taken on the team's rota and induction notes, which taught me how much organisational behaviour is driven by inherited procedure. That is directly relevant to a field where institutional habit so often shapes what governments can actually do.

Outside work I play at a local chess club and run a monthly wargaming group of about eight people, mostly refighting nineteenth and twentieth century engagements. It is a hobby, not a method, but it has made me alert to how assumptions get built into a model: fog of war, command delay and supply are either represented or quietly wished away, and the conclusions follow accordingly. I help my grandmother with her shopping and hospital appointments, which has taught me to plan around fixed constraints and to be realistic about what can be achieved in a given week.

I would like eventually to work in policy analysis, in government or the research sector. Before that I want a year of serious reading, argument and supervised writing, and to produce a dissertation extending my undergraduate work into the 1981 review and the making of British maritime commitments.

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