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Before I set my mind on studying Classics, I used to think that my purpose in life was to become a successful businessman. And so, with that in mind, my original intention was to study Economics at university. However, while studying ancient Greek for A-level, I was inspired by Homer’s exceptionally skilful treatment of human affairs in the ‘Iliad’, a book, which so fired my imagination about the vastly enlightening Classical world, that I changed my mind. This decision was in itself a Renaissance for me. I was able to escape the absolutist self in me in the same way that the Enlightenment philosophers moved away from theology in order to bring back the culture of Hellenism. Now, I would like to extend my knowledge in Classics by studying its timeless literature and philosophy and by evaluating ancient sources, which will help to examine the roots of contemporary culture. I have heard of the culture of 5th century Athens described as the first ‘knowledge explosion’. For me, the prospect of academically participating in the immense achievements of the Greeks holds great excitement. My curiosities particularly lie in ancient philosophy. Socrates is the figure that I admire the most because of his genuine attitude towards philosophy and ethics. I think it is sufficiently explained in the ‘Apology’ how much he loves knowledge for its sake and similarly how much he values the concept of “γνωθι σεαυτον”. I am also fascinated by Plato’s metaphysics and epistemology in his ‘Republic’ because it is extremely sophisticated and is certainly one of the finest answers to Thales’ question of the ultimate substance. Furthermore, Aristotle’s account of the virtues in the ‘Nichomachean Ethics’, I believe, is a brilliant one. He addresses the human telos of happiness directly and the issues of morality, pleasure and friendship are dealt with in an appropriate way. It has been a key text in my life personally and it is not surprising to me that modern philosophers have started a revival of virtue ethics. The Greek language interests me too. Unlike English or Korean both of which I speak and write fluently, I find ancient Greek so subtle and articulate. There are idioms and grammatical usages that I fully adore because of their uniqueness. For example, the use of the middle intrigues me because of its variety and irregularity. Unsurprisingly, I really enjoy working on Greek grammar and syntax. Also, I have this term started the Latin AS level and look forward to relishing the challenges that Latin has to offer, especially in terms of the Latin language. On the personal side, I am motivated, scholarly and ambitious. I am an all-round scholar and a prefect at my school and last year received the Classics prize. I think the reason why I am thriving academically is because of my serious attitude towards work and my zeal for self-realisation. Outside of academic study, I am an enthusiastic sportsman and I have represented the school 1st team in both rugby and hockey. Meanwhile, playing bridge and chess has helped me to sharpen my mind. Finally, with the end of my school career rapidly approaching, I am very much looking forward to seizing the opportunity to study a subject that genuinely fascinates me and becoming a more rounded human being at university as I believe that I have much potential to flourish in the years to come.
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.