As a volunteer worker waiting standby in the hematology and oncology department, I saw kids younger than me with no hair because they had cancer. This was in a recent work experience at the Korean Cancer Center Hospital in Seoul. There, I realized that these young cancer patients could not live the same healthy life as most other kids. This has reinforced an aspiration to research cures for diseases as a biochemist, which originated as a result of a personal experience of being a patient at a hospital and meeting many patients with different conditions. To research cures for diseases, I would need to know how the body functions and, therefore, this is what I am interested in studying. I think that learning about chemical reactions within cells that cause the cell, tissue, organ and organ system to function is more satisfactory than learning about the anatomy or physiology which have limits in biomedical research. One area of interest is stem cell research for its therapeutic potential in repairing damaged parts of body by growing new healthy tissues and organs. I believe that the key to clinically using stem cells lies in identifying how genes become inactivated when a stem cell specializes, as the current stem cell research looks at ways of differentiating embryonic stem cells into specifically specialized cells. I tried to read 'Cloning and Stem Cells' journal from December 2008. Although the journal was difficult to understand, it gave me a flavor of the progress made in this area of research. Learning the mechanism of immune response from the 'The chemistry of life' by Steven Rose was enlightening. In particular, deletion of immature T cells capable of recognizing 'self' peptidE in the thymus in order to maintain 'self-tolerance', and the failure to do so resulting in autoimmune diseases have been something new that I would like study in more depth. In addition, I read 'Power, Sex, Suicide' by Nick Lane and could learn about the mitochondrial evolution and more about respiration. In particular, the mitochondrial theory of ageing, its role in the programmed cell death, 'apoptosis', and how the failure of this program leads to cancer were thought provoking so that I would like to study more about such roles of the mitochondria. I was selected to take part in the British Biology Olympiad 2009 in my L6th year in which I was 'Highly Commended'. In preparation for this, I read ahead in Biology using several different text books and had to cover the majority of the Olympiad syllabus in my free time. The amount of reading and learning was the biggest challenge. It was my determination to achieve a medal that kept me reading the pages. I hope that my determined quality will help in going through the hard work that the Biochemistry course entails. My strongest subject is chemistry and I received the chemistry prize of the year for lower sixth. Also, I scored the best in the school for the senior UK Maths Challenge 2008. Outside class, I have participated in various extra-curricular activities such as playing percussions in the college orchestra, performing a play (Pinter Short) and a musical (Chorus Line). The Duke of Edinburgh (bronze and silver) was a challenge that tested my determination at times of tiredness. Also, as the vice-chairman of Science Committee, I helped promote Science for both staff and students at Wellington and, recently, I organized a sustainable design challenge. I am the deputy head of my boarding house. Sports wise, I am a member of my school U18 basketball team. With these determined, organized and intellectual qualities, I believe myself to be an excellent candidate for the Biochemistry course.
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.