Home / Resources / Sample Personal Statements / PPE
My decision to study PPE was confirmed during research for my EPQ, from which I learnt a lesson of crucial importance: the full understanding of any issue in society requires a multidisciplinary approach, one which combines the three disciplines of philosophy, politics and economics. The aim of my project was to ascertain the precise extent to which President Park Chung-hee was responsible for the ‘Miracle on the Han River’, the rapid economic development and industrialisation of my own country, South Korea, after the Korean War. Combining politics and economics was particularly relevant because the entirety of Park’s authoritarian rule revolved around one objective: economic growth. Indeed, weighing the explanations of liberal economists, such as Krugman’s ‘The Myth of Asia’s Miracle’, against those of the statists, such as Kim Hyung-A’s ‘Korea’s Development Under Park Chung-hee’, I concluded that Park’s state intervention had played a key role in facilitating the ‘Miracle’. This, naturally, raised difficult philosophical questions; can such economic growth justify the suspension of political freedoms and rights? I believe it can, under adapted Hobbesian principles. I also saw how the public consensus on Park was being constantly remoulded by contemporary political contexts, radically so following tumultuous events such as Korea’s democratisation in 1987 and the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, inspiring me to write a competition essay on the historiography of Park. This experience of searching for evidence, from multiple libraries, the internet, and across two languages, was one which I thoroughly and most truly enjoyed. The most interesting work I chanced upon during the EPQ was ‘Bad Samaritans’ by Chang Ha-joon, which argued that the path to development lay in pragmatic state capitalism and selective protectionism, contrary to the Washington Consensus. I found this to be well-evidenced and in agreement with my own understanding of Korea’s developmental history, and I have begun questioning several aspects of neoliberal economics in my A2 Economics syllabus, especially regarding free trade and development. I also question the inherent bias in the syllabus for low inflation through contractionary fiscal and monetary policies, which may be an unfavourable trade-off – something which I believe applies to Osborne’s austerity cuts, as the costs of slow growth and unemployment will likely outweigh the benefits. The subject of nations and nationalism is one of great interest to me, a scholarly passion which began in my History A-level, where nationalism’s role in creating the mass citizen armies of the French Revolution fascinated me (something especially relevant to me with Korea’s compulsory military service). This led me to begin reading into the phenomenon of nationalism itself, from origins and definitions, but especially regarding its ‘morality’. From Michael Sandel’s ‘Justice’, I learnt that the subjection of ethics to rigorous critical examination was essential, for political decisions could not be based solely on considerations of utility. However, I found his justification of patriotism unsatisfactory, especially since based on elusive non-voluntary obligations. Thus, I began reading several other works on the ethics of nationalism, most convincing of which I found to be Thomas Hurka’s ‘Justification for National Partiality’. This additional reading on nations and nationalism has also led to greater appreciation of my A2 Anglo-Irish History module, as it allows me to challenge numerous aspects of the nationalist interpretations of Irish history. Beyond my academic work, I have several leadership roles. I am a Prefect and a Mentor, and Deputy Head of the boarding house. I am also a licensed paraglider and enjoy playing rugby. I greatly look forward to the opportunity of truly engaging and pushing my intellectual boundaries at a university of academic excellence amidst like-minded peers and tutors.
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.