My appetite for English Literature was aroused in my third year of secondary school. Through studies done in English class, I have been taught how to truly appreciate literary works and encouraged to have a personal response to them. Until then, I had never paid particular attention to words or structure, enjoying Literature superficially. Recalling that year, two poems instantly spring to my mind: “Full Moon and Little Frieda” by Ted Hughes and “Amends” by Adrienne Rich. These are the first literary compositions that I have treasured, for their lucid style and stimulating images that have left a strong impact on my mind. My passion for Literature has originated from the creativity of expression that I could find in many literary achievements, even in those dealing with prosaic subjects. I was particularly impressed by the personification of a sickly lethargic atmosphere in T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, describing the evening as “a patient etherized upon a table”. Another aspect of Literature that I admire is the way in which it reveals the intricacy residing in a single being, creating a beautiful piece of art at the same time. Heathcliff in ‘Wuthering Heights’ is a character who I think represents faithfully the difficulty to understand a complex human being. I consider him as the most endearing character as he has moved me by his sincerity in following his passions and the dual forces that reside in him seem to reflect my own soul. In addition, Literature connects me to the enigmatic world in which I live. ‘Waiting for Godot’ is a play which, by expressing a frustrating sense of being lost, paradoxically made me feel comforted about my existence in this world. I have also found in John Donne’s “No man is an Island” a call for solidarity and compassion between men, and the sharp revelation of the last line has awakened my conscience with a stab. I envision Literature as a fine tapestry that needs to be unravelled in order to better admire its beauty and the dexterity of the weaver. When reading a truly unique piece of work, I always feel the need to dismantle its components in order to attempt to discover how the writer produces such memorable effects on readers. Moreover, my experience of reading is to delve into a writer’s world to come out of it more perceptive and knowledgeable about myself. In this perspective, Literature is a rewarding subject that leads me to self-discovery. Ali Smith’s ‘Hotel World’ has led me to question my indifference towards invisible individuals of society, by giving me insight to their consciences through the changing first-person narrative voices. Literary studies are for me an endless process of interpretation and analysis, as one’s opinion about a work can be constantly reshaped by time and experience. This is another reason why I regard Literature as an engaging and dynamic subject. When I first read Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs. Dalloway’, I thought that its internal monologues were only pervaded by melancholy and nostalgia, but when I read it a second time, I could discern a flicker of hope and enjoyment of life, especially through Septimus’s sensibility towards nature, “the human voice in certain atmospheric conditions (…) can quicken trees into life!” and his union with nature conveyed by the use of synaesthesia. Besides Literature, I also enjoy other forms of culture, and while living in Paris, I have had the privilege of accessing its rich cultural asset. Thus in my spare time, I often draw, play the piano, and visit exhibitions. With my dual nationality, French and Korean, I have approached English Literature with the external view of a foreigner, regarding it as a powerful bridge that connects me not only to British culture but to the world as well. I still have many unresolved questions on Literature and for this reason, I am deeply motivated to study English Literature in the United Kingdom, the motherland of this invaluable subject.
这是一篇在 UCAS 旧格式下撰写的成功陈述。自 2026 年入学起，个人陈述改为三个独立的回答。以下是一个范例——经济学——展示每个问题的优秀回答是什么样的：
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.
三个回答合计最多 4,000 字符，每个至少 350 字符。参见 UCAS 官方指南。