As a high school senior attending a school whose mission is to teach its students to “engage as servant leaders of the world,” I have gained a strong perspective on community values and social justice. The notorious courses in humanities that St. Paul’s offers, a combination of history, literature, and philosophy, have led me to foster a passion for thinking and a commitment to communication. My main area of academic interest hence has naturally been geared towards philosophy and languages. In fact, the two subjects are more than just an area of interest; it has become a huge part of my life. When we debate where justice stands today in social justice club, we go back to the definition of ethics by Kant and Hume and compare it to the modern-day description of justice. My fascination with philosophy even motivated me to take summer courses in Introduction to Philosophy at Oxford University and History of Early Modern Philosophy at University of Pennsylvania. Though both were challenging courses, I was able to learn, understand, and even thrive in them. This summer, I had the opportunity to explore some of oriental philosophy as well by staying at Woljeongsa for a month enrolled in a school to experience the life of a bonze aspirant. It was interesting to find similarities between Western and Eastern philosophy years before the trade of thoughts have begun. For example, at first glance, the Buddhist notion of karma and rebirth is parallel to Nietzsche’s idea of permanent return, and the place held by the enlightened in the cycle reminded me of the arbitrary privileges of philosophers in Plato’s immortality of the Soul; the Buddhist anatta and the pain and reassurance earned from it resembles existentialism and even Proverbs in the Bible. After the experience, I learned to read Siddhartha and The Unbearable Lightness of Being in a totally new light. Languages are perhaps a more evident part of my everyday life as I am able to balance English, French, Korean, and even a bit of Japanese based on my needs. While most of the time the homepage of my Google Chrome is the New York Times, before French exams it becomes Le Monde. I have French chansons, English pop, and Korean music all in my iPod, and I have read the Harry Potter series in all three languages; I have to say that it was best in English. I have learned French for five years starting from 7th grade, and am now taking the highest level offered in my school. I am one of the heads of the French Society, where we enjoy and spread French culture through cooking competitions, film screenings, and crepe cafés. I am also the head of the Kimball School Language Club, where students from our school go to a local elementary school to teach children different languages, which in my case is French. Now, I want to continue this passion of mine studying philosophy and French at Oxford University. As I have not yet had much experience in philosophy or French, I aspire to further explore these fields at Oxford. As I seek to be a traveler, Oxford will be a unique fit as the opportunity to immerse in French in France for a year would be incredibly helpful to my proficiency in the language and studying philosophy which such an esteemed faculty, tutors, and fellow students will further inspire me push myself to my limits. Studying in Europe itself is exhilarating for me. From my transcripts, you will see that not only am I a student proficient in the humanities, but I succeed in demanding courses similar to college-level courses. When I actually took a college credit course with undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania two summers ago, I finished the course with an A-. This achievement demonstrates my abilities as a goal-oriented student to confront challenges and overcome them. While maintaining a good grade in this course, I also interned under Dr. Ellen Giarelli in the Center for Autism and Developmental Disabilities Research and Epidemiology. The fact that I had the gumption to e-mail dozens of professors researching autism until someone would finally take me and that I was able to balance my daily internship with my coursework both support that I am a self-advocate with a clear vision and passion for the things I care about. While I am sure that Oxford University will push me beyond my limits, I am also confident that I am ready to take on this challenge and in turn be motivated to succeed.
이것은 기존 UCAS 형식으로 작성된 성공적인 자기소개서입니다. 2026학년도 입학부터 자기소개서는 세 개의 개별 답변으로 바뀝니다. 아래는 각 질문에 대한 우수한 답변이 어떤 모습인지 보여주는 예시 — 경제학 — 입니다:
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.
세 답변 합계 최대 4,000자, 각 답변 최소 350자입니다. UCAS 공식 안내를 참조하세요.