Home / Resources / Sample Personal Statements / Land Economy
Undertaking missionary work in Mexico, I learnt that sometimes one’s helping hand does not always lead to a better life for others, but rather a greater tragedy for those who are still left out. To solve this inequality, I am eager to make a broader impact in the lives of the less privileged. The juxtaposition of such poverty and abuse of human rights with the contemporary life of the privileged have compelled me to seek an understanding of the forces that determine the regional economy and the state of Government. Certainly, we live in a turmoil-racked world from the fight for democracy - such as ongoing Arab-spring – to global social injustice, where many governments have responded by downplaying of voices and the free speech of those rebelling against the status quo. Simultaneously, our generation is in the middle of “Megachange” (Megachange: The World in 2050 by ‘The Economist’ group), where technology and current economic systems are marching us towards different values, modes of life and new systems of philosophy. The development and success story of e-Estonia with a Blockchain foundation backbone has captivated my attention in the possible correct use of Blockchain to reinvent government for a new era of legitimacy and integrity. Reading Blockchain Revolution by Don Tapscott, I became keen to evaluate how technology could be a solution in ensuring justice and transparancy of the empowered public institutions, such as judicial system and application of liquid democracy. I am interested in what technology creates and destroys, in relation to the long-term sustainability of employment in the future; the position of government in providing a lawful, yet fair regulation is an essential challenge. During a month long experience with customer trend analysts in NH Investment Securities, Seoul, I witnessed the dismissal of 7% of the workers in this large corporation, after employing new digital programmes for calculations and predictions. To pursue my interest, I have initiated a futurology club; with a growing membership of 32, to whom I deliver a short weekly lecture as a preamble to discussion of new topics, such as the 4th industrial revolution and legal methods for digitizing the public sector. I have participated in the GEC Model United Nations for 2 years and was given a chair role in the second year, which allowed me to understand the significance of co-operation through negotiation and debating. Until last year, I led the NLCS Jeju Enterprise club, as CEO. The motto remains ‘Good institutions communicate’. I believe communication is an important quality, which leads to creativity and rational bloom of ideas. I was also delighted to express my passion in sustainable economy and environment, when I was handpicked to give a speech on the importance of education for the sustainable future in 2016 Cambridge CIS conference on Sustainability in Churchill College. With a title of: youngest winner of Chief minister’s award from Ministry of Education, Science and Technology in Korea, I have also been honored with the Academic Award from President Obama in 2012 and a letter from the White House, by bringing up an investigation in “absolute vacuum and possible variation in speed of light in space”. As a former scientist, I look at the world as a pool of undefined anomalies, which are to be identified and evaluated in a most logical way. The word “change” thrills me. The social wave front of the 4th industrial revolution and AI is creating immense conflicts and concerns. Upcoming deviations are not a matter of fear, but are instead giving us a valuable clue of how our economy will be shaped and where law should take part. I believe that I have the ability to offer valid and impartial view that incorporates perspectives from different realms of study, and it is to this end that I wish to study economics and the role of the body politic.
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.