As a volunteer with a local soup kitchen, I work with a team distributing food to and checking the wellbeing of lower income families residing in rental public flats. One day we came across a family of five whose story startled me. They had no breadwinner and, unbelievably, all of them were seriously or terminally ill. Yet they were not receiving any form of social support from the government and had been relying mostly on the help of NGOs to get by. This encounter exemplifies a social problem which worries me - the lack of adequate social security support in Singapore despite its economic strength. I believe more attention should be paid to solving problems of poverty and inequality. I volunteered with the soup kitchen not just to help the poor in Singapore but also to understand their hardships as their interests are often overlooked. As an economics student, I have learnt of how well informed economic policy can improve lives by guiding social analysis. Its pertinence as a subject excites me and has driven me to understand it more through books, exposure in volunteer work and participation in many economics-related competitions. I obtained a distinction award in the National Economics and Financial Management Quiz, where participants are tested on quick thinking, logical and mathematical skills. I submitted an essay for the GlaxoSmithKline-Economic Development Board Book Prize on how Singapore can capitalise on Asian talent as an engine of growth. I participated in the local Math Olympiad and received a bronze award. I also did a month long internship at Centennial Asia Advisors where my work contributed to the analysis of the Great Recession and explored the process of purchasing bonds to solve the crisis. It exposed me to the immensity of macroeconomics, and I learnt a lot about the application of economic policy. I have also been working on making the change that I can. Through collaborating with an NGO, a team of friends and I have committed ourselves to helping the village of Taom in Cambodia edge out of their poverty by building schools and providing water filtration devices for members of the village. We also intend to support children with scholarships from fund-raisers. Being personally involved in helping Taom escape its poverty trap is one of my goals, and I realise that a firm grasp of economics will go far in doing so. As I seek to help others, I too seek to grow as a person. I participated in The Odyssey of The Mind, a competition testing one’s ability to think creatively through dramatic performance in a team. We flew to Iowa to compete against teams from 60 other countries and emerged World Champions. I was also an avid sailor, having represented my school as its captain and Singapore in the international arena. What I treasure most from both experiences are the relationships I formed with members of my teams and the importance of dedication and perseverance in order to excel. At school, I contributed to the founding of the Young Diplomats' Society, an interest group that focused on Model United Nations Conferences (MUNC). At the Princeton University MUNC I received an honourable mention. At the Nanyang Technological University MUNC I was conferred the title of Dorothy Cheung Award for Best Delegate. I also organised the annual iMUN@AC, being Chief of Staff in one year and Secretary General in another. These MUNCs also led me to nurture a deep interest for global politics. I applied this knowledge and interest to my own analysis of the causes of the Rwandan Genocide, the topic I chose for my 4000-word IB Extended Essay, an engaging exercise in independent learning which I thoroughly enjoyed. I received an "A" grade for this research paper. As Keynes said, an economist is part philosopher, part statesman and part mathematician. It is with great hope that I am able to read economics so that I may one day be able to learn how to make change on all fronts local, regional and global.
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.