Since my first piano lesson, I have developed a wide-ranging love of music that takes in everything from Bach to George Crumb. In order to further understand how the composers throughout the different ages trigger audience's emotions, I engage myself in analysis of the pieces I listen to and play. I then attempt to further identify the components to the spirit of the music, which I imitate and experiment through improvisation and then develop them as my own compositions. Recently, I analysed the Prelude and Fugue in F sharp minor from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier whilst preparing for my LRSM exam. During the process, I became more conscious of the voices and harmonic progression. I was fascinated to observe how Bach develops the three themes and combines them as a triple counterpoint throughout the fugue. After studying the piece, I am more conscious of the structure and the texture, highlighting the different entries of the themes in the performance. Understanding the history of keyboard instruments is also vital to piano performances. After reading John Butts' Playing with History: The Historical Approach to Musical Performance, I have questioned how I adopt the style and respect the authenticity of Baroque music on the modern piano. I then share my views with the audience. I visited the Bartok memorial house in Csalan Road, Budapest during a school music trip. I have also visited the Zoltan Kodaly Pedagogical Institute of Music, where I was invited to have taster lessons. I listened to a few folk tunes, which were sung in lessons, and was intrigued by the Kodaly method, which sees singing is seen as the essential element to music education. After that, I re-visited Bartok's Mikrokosmos and Suite Op.14, where I became more sensitive to the modes that Bartok used to depict folk melody. Over the summer, I attended two music summer courses: a conducting course directed by George Hurst in Sherborne and a piano course directed by Murray McLachlan at Chetham's School of Music. Attending piano recitals given by amateurs, students and professionals every night made me more aware of the tone and sound produced by every individual. This enabled me to understand how different musicians interpret music. I then read Chau Yuan-Pu's The Colors between Black and White, which features a collection of interviews with a selection of professional pianists. This reminded me of the benefit of globalization, through which people of diverse upbringings can more easily exchange their ideas on music. While attending the conducting course, I realised that the essence of conducting lies within score studying in order to respect the composer's intentions. A considerable amount of time of the conducting course was spent on interpreting the tempo and studying the instruments and timbre. Great emphasis was also stressed on how the conducting technique is only used as a means to making music. Having had the experience of conducting a full orchestra, I would like to continue to do so whilst at university. Whilst studying with Adam Gorb, my interest in the field of contemporary music deepened. I also attended Joanna Macgregor's recital during the course, in which I was privileged to listen to A Little Suite for Christmas AD. 1979 by George Crumb. Immediately after the recital, I composed a piece for string piano, imitating the sound of bells and started learning pieces for string piano such as George Crumb's Makrokosmos. Having had the opportunity to study the evolution of music from early chants to contemporary music, I would like to experiment with music and recording history through composition. I have recently opened a blog to document and share my views, which includes concert and CD reviews, as well as introduction to composers and performers. Reading music at university would enable me to broaden my knowledge of music history and composition. Being a classical music radio broadcaster is one of the ambitions I would like to achieve after university.
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.