My life so far has been influenced by curiosity and a passion for logical thinking. This is why, during high school, I have been trying to seek knowledge in all areas, not just the ones which particularly interested me. So far, I have not found greater satisfaction than the one you achieve when solving a problem by basing your solution on logical arguments; this comes from my fascination for puzzles, something I do ever since I was 4. Despite the fact that I first had a penchant for Mathematics, managing to achieve a bronze medal at the National Olympiad, my real passion, as I discovered in the 6th grade, was for Computer Science. Programming came natural to me and as I learned more, I gained a deeper understanding of the way computer programs and algorithms function. In that year, with only 2 months of preparation and lots of hard work I qualified for the National Olympiad of Informatics and scored in the first 15 contestants. This arouse an ambition to learn more, so in 2007 I came 6th, in 2008 3rd and in 2009 5th, having won the 1st place at almost every regional and local stage, even when competing against older students. Nevertheless, I achieved my best result so far when I qualified in the national team of the top 20 high school students, a platform of selection for the international programming contests. I find competitions very engaging and gratifying as they have taught me how to manage my time efficiently and how to work independently and effectively. I also learned how to withstand great amounts of pressure, set objectives and bring everything to the most successful end. Above all, my past experience with competitions helped me develop unique ways of solving problems, an advantage over the other contestants. But my interest in Computer Science got beyond programming contests so I started learning new languages apart from C++, and I extended my graphical design capabilities. Thus, learning PHP, Javascript, HTML and CSS enabled me to create websites and gain new roles in extracurricular activities. One teambased competition in which I participated in the 11th grade was the national ThinkQuest 2009. My team and I contrived a project about nanotechnology called “Nano3” which won the 1st prize. In it, I made use of my programming and designing abilities as well as my writing skills. Another important activity in which I took part was Science Week, an international fair meant to promote handson science among students. In the 2009 edition I delivered a speech to over 250 students about the usage and benefits Linux and in 2010 my involvement was even more significant as I was both responsible for creating an identity for the project and evaluating, as part of the science committee in the Computer Science contest. I found the experience especially tantalizing. Moreover, switching roles from contestant to problem developer and evaluator gave me a valuable insight in the challenges of creating programming tasks. This year, I’ve have also been working on our school’s website, as a wrapup of my webdesign knowledge so far. Having had the opportunity to work with an institution meant not only delivering high quality work, but also cooperating with my teachers differently. I am a person with a wide variety of interests. Besides figuring out intriguing problems and solving riddles, I am also attracted by philosophy, since it challenges the very bases of reason and helps you understand the human mind. Furthermore, I like to be connected with the latest news in technology and in order to relax, I dance. All these experiences, my passions, as well as the skills I have gained from them, made me realize that I want to study Computer Science and eventually become a computer programmer. Challenging my creative thinking, independent learning skills, tenacity, aptitudes, capacities and prior knowledge of Computer Science, this undergraduate course would mean an extraordinary opportunity for my personal and professional development.
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.