Home / Resources / Sample Personal Statements / Anthropology & Archaeology
I want to pursue a discipline that digs down to the very root of our humanity. Whilst there are subjects that throw light on human nature and society, archaeology and anthropology seems to me the most inter-disciplinary and richest of subjects. Such a degree course offers a breadth of study which I would relish. My avid interest in Native American history, ignited by reading Wilson's 'The Earth Shall Weep', was fuelled by working on an organic farm in Wilsall, Montana over the summer. Remains discovered in the town had been uncovered as those of a Clovis skeleton, America's oldest human remains and an ancestor of the Native Americans. Surprisingly, it was the reaction of the locals that absorbed me more than the skeleton itself. The locals refused to acknowledge the finding, remaining in denial of its existence. Fascinated, I persisted in deciphering the social codes and attitudes of the conservative ranching community that generated such a reaction. With a desire to gain knowledge on the study of humans, I found Geertz's concept of the anthropologist seeking complexity and ordering it made me want to pursue the subject at degree level. Reading further, I found that Geertz's interpretation in his ethnography 'Notes on a Balinese Cockfight' of the atmosphere and emotions created during a cockfight as the foundations for that community, and the binding of the humans involved, compelled me to consider the everyday acts that define the society I live in. Thus I returned to a piece of recreational reading, 'Watching the English'. Fox's societal 'rules' in Britain made me consider the disparities between what is considered the norm in different societies. In Marrakech recently, I found interest in unveiling what was considered sacred or taboo in a Moroccan society compared to my own, a thought triggered by Douglas's 'Purity and Danger'. I found the close linguistic ties between the words for 'woman', 'taboo' and 'sacred place' revealing of that society's attitude to women. I reflected on a lecture I delivered at my school's feminist society on the objectification of women in the Western media. In contrasting ways women in both societies seemed to me to have been reduced to mere commodity. Working in a gallery has enabled me to study firsthand human's interaction with the art they produce. Grayson Perry's social commentary in his artwork spawned my thought on how art can advertently or inadvertently comment on our societies. Thus, I entered my school's Philip Hendy competition, examining Mexico's culture and customs through the art created for the Day of the Dead. I began, in conjunction with reading Fowler's 'The Archeology of Personhood', to understand the importance of examining a society's material culture in order to interpret its beliefs and values. Whilst visiting Aachen Treasury, the piety and warrior ethos of Carolingian society was revealed to me through an artefact rather than the written word, revealing in turn the intimate connection between the disciplines of archeology and anthropology. Ensuring my gap year supplements my degree I will be joining a 4th century dig in Stanmer. Consistently involved in charitable endeavours, from tutoring English with youth organization SE1 United to working with the elderly at Garside House Nursing Home, I am currently working in a fundraising call center and undertaking an internship with Save the Children. Travelling to India, I will be volunteering with Sadhana Forest. Working with the local villagers to raise awareness about ecologically responsible and sustainable ways of living, I will be embedded in their community understanding their living practices whilst also questioning my own and cultivating new ones. I would thus hope to bring to my degree studies knowledge gained in the intervening time, and am convinced that my experience would be enriched by the insights that such a course of study would offer.
This is a successful statement written under the previous UCAS format. From 2026 entry, the personal statement is three separate answers. Below is a worked example — Economics — showing how a strong answer to each of the three questions reads:
Volunteering at a Saturday food bank in Croydon, I helped a single father of three who had moved into temporary accommodation after a zero-hours contract collapsed. What startled me was not the hardship but the bureaucracy — he had been waiting six weeks for Universal Credit because a payment glitch had reclassified him as self-employed. A Sutton Trust talk by Stephen Machin pushed me from that observation toward the literature on benefit take-up and conditional cash transfers — first Banerjee and Duflo's evidence from rural India and Mexico, then Anna Aizer's recent NBER work on the design of welfare-to-work programmes in the US. I want to study Economics because the question running through these readings — why some welfare systems escape the dependency trap while others reproduce it — has rigorous answers that combine empirical microeconomics, mechanism design, and political economy in a way no other discipline can.
Further Mathematics has been the single qualification that has reshaped how I read Economics. Working through the chapter on differential equations let me approach Solow's original 1956 paper rather than the textbook simplification — and seeing convergence as an asymptotic result rather than a guarantee made me sceptical of growth-theory papers that quote "China is converging to the US frontier" without specifying the underlying production-function assumptions. That scepticism became my EPQ. Building on Acemoglu and Robinson's Why Nations Fail and Elhanan Helpman's The Mystery of Economic Growth, I asked why the post-1978 Chinese growth episode fits neither the standard Solow convergence prediction nor the institutional pessimism of the extractive-institutions framework. My answer, framed around within-country variation in property-rights protection across coastal special economic zones, was the most rigorous piece of academic work I have produced. Economics A-level supplied the discipline-level vocabulary — perfect competition, Pareto efficiency, deadweight loss — but the model that has stayed with me is the prisoner's dilemma I first met in Maths Olympiad preparation, which I returned to repeatedly when reading Schelling's The Strategy of Conflict. In History A-level, the unit on the Bretton Woods system gave me the institutional context for Friedman's 1953 essay on flexible exchange rates — a connection that taught me how economic theory and political choice constantly co-evolve.
For the John Locke Institute 2025 Economics paper I argued — against my initial intuition — that personalised pricing is welfare-improving in aggregate, drawing on Pigou's first-degree price-discrimination framework, Hal Varian's 1989 paper on price discrimination, and the more recent empirical work by Dubé and Misra on ZipRecruiter's pricing experiments. Writing the essay forced me to take seriously the strongest version of the fairness objection — Sandel's argument in What Money Can't Buy that markets reshape the goods they price — and then to build a synthesis that conceded the moral worry while defending the consumer-surplus calculation. I came out of the process convinced that the welfare economics taught at undergraduate level is more subtle than the textbook indifference curves let on. Outside the essay competition, the book that has shaped me most is Katharina Pistor's The Code of Capital. Pistor's argument that property law constructs rather than merely protects economic value runs counter to the standard market-design literature I had been reading, and I have spent two terms working through her chapters on collateral, debt, and shareholder rights alongside the Acemoglu-Johnson critique she draws on. To test the framework against my own context, I built a small dataset on Hong Kong residential property using the publicly released Land Registry data and computed the share of the housing stock held by corporate (rather than personal) entities — a 32-line Python project that taught me more about institutional economics than any chapter I had read on it.
Up to 4,000 characters across the three answers, with a minimum of 350 each. See the official UCAS guidance.