Arguably, this is an age where societal development is closely linked with advances in science and technology. Things we take for granted, such as drugs, capture my curiosity. This is because our manipulation of them is within the limits of our knowledge on the complexity of life. Therefore progress is largely dependent on explorations and breakthroughs in the frontier of our scientific knowledge. Our understanding of life’s complexity has been pushed into greater depths by generations of biologists, and I am equally eager to pursue this mission. I am particularly intrigued with transcription and translation, and from my reading I have been exploring the complicated regulation processes for gene expression, including transcription factors and RNA interference pathways. This deeper understanding gives me true appreciation for the intricacy of these cellular processes, which come together in perfect order to form a functional healthy being. I have also done reading on ‘lipid rafts’, which has given me insight into a more sophisticated and dynamic model of cell membranes, including the role of Golgi apparatus in sorting membrane proteins and lipids. Writing my Extended Essay in Chemistry has increased my maturity as a scientist. The process of writing my extended essay was stimulating as there were many opportunities to exchange scientific ideas with my supervisor through dialogue. By devising my own method, I sought to analyze the zinc oxide content in different brands of sunscreen. There were some obstacles to begin with as the data collected using a back titration method suggested there were negative amounts of zinc oxide in the sunscreens. In the process of solving this problem, I first brainstormed the causes of it by critically assessing every step in my method. From my analysis, I identified the systematic error affecting the reliability of the data: other chemicals present in the sunscreen had influenced the pH of the solution, creating a deviation between the data and the expected value. In the end I solved this by filtering the insoluble chemicals, which significantly improved the data. Recently, I completed an exciting summer course focused on biotechnology at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Working in the laboratory with E.coli almost every day, I was introduced to techniques such as plate assays, identifying bacterial colonies which are transformed by recombinant plasmid DNA and express a certain enzyme, which in this case was endoglucanase. Within our groups, I also presented in front of a panel of professors and my fellow students on telomeres and telomerase, about their functions and problems associated with them. This allowed me to develop my communication skills on a small group level and to larger audiences. In addition, I attended a variety of lectures, which opened my mind to the diversity in the fields of the sciences. The experience has confirmed my interest to explore the biological sciences and its applications in more depth. I also enjoy playing the violin and piano, which I have done for 11 years, and will be performing at the Shanghai World Expo as a member of the Hong Kong Youth Symphony Orchestra in October. I am also a committed volunteer at a local elderly centre, working with social workers to help the local residents. From balancing my studies with these activities, I have acquired good time management skills, which I will need in order to excel in university. Although frustration sometimes sets in, my commitment for music and charity work reflects my determination to pursue my goals even when I am facing difficulties. My goal in the future is to bring scientific knowledge I have acquired into research. I aspire to further specialize in pharmacology, and to be able to widen our understanding of how drugs work within our bodies. Ultimately this will contribute to the innovations of drugs, which can become more effective in treating diseases and disorders.
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.