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I have always felt compelled to discover and understand how things work. I would love to study Physics at university to learn far more about how the world works. I attend a weekly Physics discussion society with a group of individuals at school where we talk about a specific problem with a teacher and try to solve or explain it. Such problems include why a polystyrene cuboid will stay horizontal when floating on water yet a denser wooden cuboid tends to float diagonally on its side. Another problem we discussed was how to find the velocity-time graph equation for an object falling under the influence of a gravitational field, taking into account the change in force as it nears. We have also looked at the inertia of rolling objects, angular momentum and even tried to find the compression of a car tyre with varying air pressure inside it. These sessions have really helped me learn more than just the A-Level syllabus and develop a better ability to solve problems. I enjoy trying tricky Physics questions and problem solving in general, which is why I take part in the Maths and Physics Olympiads. In Maths, I particularly enjoy the mechanics modules and love the strong relation they have to Physics. I am challenging myself to complete the fifth mechanics module this coming summer. So far I have achieved full UMS marks in two of the Physics papers, two Maths papers and two Biology papers which has set me up well for my last year with the aim of obtaining at least two A stars. I have been watching Physics lectures on the internet by Professor Walter Lewin from MIT. He has numerous recorded lectures on a huge variety of topics; I’ve found the ones on electromagnetism and classical mechanics particularly interesting. Two of my favourite Physics books include the inspiring autobiography of Richard Feynman; I found it interesting reading about his childhood and how he had grown up into a great physicist. I’ve also read ‘Time travel through Einstein’s universe’, which was a brilliant book providing a clear and deep insight into special relativity. I often read parts of the NewScientist and enjoy novels in general. I am interested in electronics; I have designed and built numerous projects in my free time. I have taught myself some programming languages including C++, pbasic, spin and an assembly language. These have allowed me to incorporate microprocessors into my projects, which opened up vast new areas to work in, such as graphics and audio. I led a small team of students from school to participate in the Cambridge University Spaceflight competition and as a group we ended up winning both the independence award and the overall competition prize. Being able to fly ones own experiment into near space alongside university students was incredible. My group built a payload, flown by a huge helium balloon to measure temperature and ozone concentrations over ascending height. I have completed my bronze and silver Duke of Edinburgh and am finalising my gold award. I participated in DoE because I’m fond of camping and trekking, I love the open outdoors, the spectacular views one can see and the company of a good group of friends. I completed the Yorkshire Peaks Challenge with a school friend this summer. I am curious about the environment and am in the schools Sustainability Committee. I recently won an internal school design contest where I built an electricity producing exercise bike, the prize was a mere hundred pounds. I have worked on two occasions for a short period of time with ACR Controls Ltd, a small engineering company that designs control systems for buildings. It was a fascinating experience; I learnt about how the business was managed, I also saw how they designed the systems they install and the stages of production from CAD drawings to manufacture. I have become accustomed to their design schematics and independently aided with the design of one small project they had while I was there.
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.