How To Write an Oxbridge Personal Statement

In this video I walk you through the personal statement that got me into Cambridge University! If you enjoy and find the video helpful then it would mean a lot if you could like and subscribe, and also let me know in the comments any future videos that you would like to see! UCAS Personal Statement Page: https://www.ucas.com/applying/applyin... WHO AM I? Hi there! My name is Nikola – I’m a Cambridge University graduate, now working at J.P. Morgan, and enjoy making YouTube videos in my spare time. My aim through this channel is to provide videos that will be able to inform you and create discussion on a variety of topics, hopefully doing so in an entertaining way! CONNECT WITH ME Instagram: @nikola.milojkovic_yt TikTok: @nikola.milojkovic_yt LinkedIn: linkedin/nikola-milojkovic Business Inquiries: [email protected] MY PERSONAL STATEMENT At a young age, my parents began moving between countries as economic migrants in search of opportunity. This made me interested in the reasons behind such emigration and how it has been promoted by economic agreements such as the EU's free movement of labour. The decisions of individuals and how they are directed by society have therefore always intrigued me. Thus, the reason I want to study Economics is to develop my understanding of the influences behind human behaviour and how it can be guided by economic policy towards maximising social benefit. Observing irrationality in peers around me who displayed the extrapolation bias by projecting a high score in one test to future outcomes, I questioned the modelling assumption defining human behaviour as rational. Hence, I began exploring the psychological framework of Behavioural Economics through Dan Ariely's "Predictably Irrational". Whilst Ariely portrays his experiments as highlighting biases that undermine the neoclassical assumption of perfect rationality, Milton Friedman ["The Methodology of Positive Economics"] argues such experiments can't act independently as evidence against it. Despite concurring that this assumption demands models to be "reconstructed in line with each development in psychology", Friedman concludes: "Complete realism is clearly unattainable", instead placing an emphasis on the result of a model's methodology as opposed to its realism. I believe the answer lies in between: not within attempts to obtain perfect realism, but rather in the classification of which departures from realism we can afford to include in models versus which deviate too far from the objective truth. The concept of rationality was also present in my EPQ comparing irrationality and deregulation as causes of the 2008 crisis through their roles perversely incentivising subprime lending. Irrationality appeared to me the crisis' origin, as opposed to deregulatory acts condemned by Brooksley Born as the cause of the crisis and failure of FED chairman Alan Greenspan. I find Mark Calabria's arguments ["Did Deregulation cause The Financial Crisis?"] convincing in highlighting that deregulation changed less in the derivatives market than the likes of Born imply, arguing her regulatory ideals would fail to "reduce risk at all". Deregulatory flaws may have handed banks too much freedom, yet I believe the crisis was not a failure of deregulation but an inevitability of irrational exuberance as banks took excessive risks on subprime mortgage positions. Interested in economic responses to the pandemic, I read a report indicating the Bank of England's consideration of a monetary instrument: Negative Interest Rate Policy (NIRP). Believing NIRP to be implausible due to the liquidity trap, I was intrigued as to why the Bank was considering it and so began researching its application in the past, a subject further explored in my RES "Young Economist of the Year" essay. I evaluated how negative interest rates failed to dilute deflationary pressures in Japan, but with Andreas Jobst ["NIRP: Implications for Monetary Transmission"] diagnosing this through domestic issues in an ageing demographic and large debt, I comparatively analysed Sweden's effective use of NIRP to depreciate its currency, lauded by the IMF as a sustainable model. This altered my initial thesis that deemed NIRP ineffective due to the Zero-Lower-Bound as I arrived at the conclusion that it can flourish under a banking system where cash-hoarding is limited, and interest rates are persistently held in deep negative territory. Outside academia, I have been able to manage being the Head Boy of my school, captain of tennis and football teams and a grade three guitar player, whilst engaging in events such as the National Citizen Service and Duke of Edinburgh. Ultimately, I believe that my advanced quantitative, problem solving and written skills, alongside my passion for the subject, would make me an ideal Economics undergraduate.