Physics and Philosophy explore both the physical and metaphysical world. The former poses questions such as 'what are quarks?' whereas the latter can ask 'are quarks real?'. They form a complete whole in understanding the world to me, for a gap in knowledge in the former can be explored via latter, and vice-versa. I want to develop my enquiry skills in understanding theories of physicality, such as Newtonian Mechanics, as well as non-physical theories like Anti-Realism. My favourite topic is Mechanics because of how it can reduce a physical phenomenon, such as a gravitational force, to mathematical expressions which apply directly to our world. Learning about Quantum Mechanics however, interested me because a research programme so far removed from Newtonian physics was also just as relevant. Quanta's indeterminacy gives it a sense of intrigue, as it flies in the face of common sense. How can an object be in two places at once? Why can we not determine the velocity and position of a particle? By studying these topics at a higher level, I hope to gain more rounded knowledge of both systems and a better grasp of how relevant they are. I've also read a few physics-related articles in New Scientist and been surprised at how philosophical some subjects become, like the conceivability of Free Will, as well as computers that can automatically generate formulae from experiments. If the latter is true, can the computed approach be as reliable as a human who can conceptualise the physical entities themselves, as opposed to just binary? The logical grounding of Philosophy tackled my own inconsistent common-sense beliefs with the “Theories of Perception” unit, which introduced me to Naive and Sophisticated forms of Realism and Idealism. Moral philosophy struck me most, because theories that we unconsciously apply every day have such gaping flaws that go unrealised; from the unreality of Hobbesian 'state of nature' to the rigidity of Kantian deontology. They make me want to study them further to realise answers to some problems they entail: to develop an ethical theory of my own that borrows from and improves upon their ideas. Ethics brought forth my skills in critiquing more so than the other units, so it is the topic that I'm most passionate about. I've read sections of “Understand Ethics” by M.Thompson to better understand the syllabus, but to gain knowledge in the Philosophy of Science, I've also read through “What is This Thing Called Science?” by A.F.Chalmers and “Representing and Intervening” by Ian Hacking. My roundedness for other subjects can also be seen in Mathematics and Art. The former has given me solid grounding for the arithmetic side of Physics by rigorously testing my deductive skills, while the latter allowed me to explore my creativity and imagination, as well as methods of realising the ideas in different media. Partaking in extra-curricular activities have made me an independent problem-solver who frequently works to deadlines, as well as a role model who engages with the community. I've co-administrated a forum for several years that produced digital pixel drawings, which later fed into my own personal site that I now manage. In joining the Interact fund-raiser, I helped put forward ideas and supported events that included the Christmas fair and a Sponsored Silence. Homework Club took me on to aid the library, where I mentored Year 8 pupil and was also selected to help update the library's database. Currently I am Head Boy, making me a student face of the school. I have to write and deliver speeches, perform supervisory duties during lunch and coordinate prefects, in addition to organising events such as the Summer Ball. In taking this course, I wish to become an educator. Be it as a lecturer or academic author, I want to broach these subjects for future scholars and contemporaries; to be in a strong position to put forth my own opinion on leading edge discoveries and theories, both physical and metaphysical.
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.