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Since I was in primary school, I have enjoyed mathematics as I love to analyse problems to find solutions. Now having studied maths for nearly fifteen years, I like it even more as I find it increasingly interesting and useful. Wishing to read maths at University is a natural choice to me. I find maths interesting because while it demands strict logical thinking, it also involves a huge amount of imagination. Examples include the square root of -1 and the concept of a higher dimension of the Universe, neither of which can be seen nor thought rationally without a sense of imagination in one's brain. They may not appear useful in daily life but influence the progress of science hugely, for example The Big Bang Theory about the birth of our universe relies upon some complicated differential equations. Complex numbers are used in electricity calculations. Maths is also useful directly in daily human life. Without mathematical mechanics it is impossible to create a functioning machine as it may not have enough energy to work, for example scientists would need to calculate the amount of fuel a space shuttle needs to escape Earth's gravity. A tall building would also be a dream since you will never know how easily it would topple. On the other hand the study of the probability enables lottery companies to generate huge income, while statistics is essential to accountants and actuaries, both are vital to the economy of the whole world. Because of my interest in maths, I have taken part in five UKMT maths challenges since I was in year 9 and I received gold certificates in all of them. In 2007 and 2008 I got distinctions in the intermediate mathematics Olympiad. I particularly enjoy attempting the Olympiad questions because they are not purely complicated theories; they inspire us to think outside the box to find the solution which, very often, is simple while being beautiful. In 2008, as one of the top 40 in the UK, I attended a one-week summer school of UKMT. I have not only learned things beyond the school syllabus such as the Pigeonhole Principle, which is a simple idea that can solve some otherwise difficult problems, but I also became friends with different people from various parts of the UK. In the following year I received a Fuller Memorial Prize for Mathematics in my school, showing again my ability in this area. Last summer I worked in an accounting firm. While I was there, I learnt to arrange files and documents and enter the data in the computer. I then used a computer program to generate a financial report for a company. All the work required me to have a clear system of arranging pieces of paper and to know what type of expense or income the numbers belong to. I was under great pressure since a mistake could lead to fines to the company, so I had to be extremely careful. This experience made me realise that a clear logical mind is very important in our life, and studying maths will help. In my free time I enjoy playing bridge, a game not only relying on playing skill, but also good analysis and cooperation between the pair. With a good partner, we managed to qualify to the U19 Pairs National Final for three times, despite the fact that we were not available for the final competition. We also came 8th in the School Cup in March 2010. I have also been playing piano for 9 years and I am about to take the grade 8 exam. One of the grade 8 exam pieces includes a type of music called Fugue. Surprisingly my teacher told me that the composer wrote this music mathematically where he planned carefully and had to calculate how the notes are arranged. To me, this is a fascinating example showing the beauty of maths to the world. Studying mathematics in the University would certainly provide me with the opportunity to learn it in greater depth and help me to appreciate more of its beauty. I also believe I can further develop my independence and meet different people in the University life, which I really look forward to.
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.