My excitement for meals compared to my sister when I was little was the biggest mystery throughout my childhood. I was the only one who ate while she refused to eat anything at every meal. Given that psychological science is still at its infancy in China, it was not surprising that my family did not seek professional help. The silver lining to this was what sparked my interest in psychology, not only to study eating disorders (ED) comprehensively, but also to discover ways to contribute to this growing science in my country. While studying Abnormal Psychology at Brown University summer school, I had a chance to study anorexia nervosa (AN) from a more active way rather than passive reading. The two papers written by Zandian (2007) and Jauregui-Lobera (2012) gave me a new viewpoint of psychology: the brain functions in multiple ways to contribute to any behavior. Apart from a neuroscientific perspective whereby lower levels of neurotransmitter 5-HT metabolites may contribute to the illness, what fascinated me the most were the descriptions of the characteristics of electrical signals in AN patients; more signals of wakefulness are observed in the EEG accompanied with a reduced slow-wave activity during all nREM to REM cycles of sleep. To further explore this topic, I supported an experiment conducted by the local health research center examining the characteristics of brain waves of teenagers. Not only was I involved in the full hands-on process of an experiment, it also provided me the opportunity to apply theoretical knowledge in real situations. In my opinion, using EEG to measure the brain waves of AN patients when they are eating or exposed to food makes the results more valid, as I thought sleeping is not a representative measure sample for ED patients, and I expect an opportunity to explore my thought. The skills I acquired including soft skills such as communication with participants sparked my interest in the experimental side of psychology, and I believe they would be a transferrable skill to help me with these areas of psychology in the university. I always believed that psychology overlaps with many scientific fields. Another peculiar interest of mine that drives my desire to study psychology at a tertiary level grew from my study in Spanish. Ozanska-Ponikwia’s review (2012) discussed the effect of different languages on personalities, that people not only change linguistically while shifting languages, but also perform distinctive behaviors. I think the study lacks the consideration of language shifts in Asian languages, such as sampling bilinguals who are proficient in Chinese and Japanese. As although there were numerous studies described in the paper to support its existence in Asian languages also, the bulk of them were based on Indo-European languages which may limit its generalizability. Asian languages should be researched as another major category as not only characters used are distinctive compared to those examined in the paper, the grammar structure is entirely different as well. I suspect that they may even present a different result; for example, cultural assimilation might occur for China and Japan, which had a long communicative history, there might be no personality distinctions in the majority of residents in two countries, which restrains the possibility for personalities change while shifting between two languages. I would like to test my hypothesis further since at the moment evidence is lacking, and it ignites my craving to explore more relationships between psychology and regular things we experience every day. I believe that studying psychology as a major is the best way to discover more holistic opinions and develop critical skills that challenge my own beliefs. With the help of these, I am confident to eliminate the preconceptions of psychology in China and make contributions to psychological sciences in top English institutions, as well as within my own country.
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.