From a young age I have been mesmerised by the world of science and technology. I am specifically drawn by the science of the materials that are used to create our industrial world. When the Nobel Prize was just recently awarded to the discoverers of graphene, a breakthrough, atom-thin carbon material, my fascination has been reignited. I picture myself one day using the skills that I will acquire at your honoured institution to make invaluable contributions to the world. To live my fascination, I have poured my last two summers' energy into the laboratories of a company that specialises in metallurgical engineering. I worked with professional engineers and, under guidance, operated machines that tested alloys' properties, recorded and analysed data, and took part in the actual manufacturing. Later on, I visited the laboratories of Baosteel Group, the 3rd largest steel manufacturer in the world, where diligent engineers researched on new machineries to facilitate production. The inspiring works of engineers have awaken my inner ambitions. As I peered over their shoulders onto the scratch papers with its compact equations and elaborate diagrams, I also felt the need for one's strong background in science. Luckily, physics is my favourite and strongest subject; in grade 11 I self-studied AP Physics B and C's, the latter's contents requiring a mastery of calculus. My power of understanding has always enabled me to grasp difficult scientific concept; as well, solving physics problems has brought me pure delight that cannot be found elsewhere. Engineering also takes strongly from mathematics, which is another of my fortes. My sprint ahead in this area started in grade 6, when I studied grade 8 math at the local high school, overcoming difficulty and building a genuine foundation. Now, 6 years later, the same intrepid spirit and thirst for knowledge has taken me into the lecture halls of the University of British Columbia, where I excel in Calculus III. I have also earned certificates of distinction for the Gauss, Pascal, Cayley, and Euclid math contests. Math is the mother tongue of physics and engineering; I certainly hope that my strength in math will prove useful. Although my ambition in engineering and my love for science and math have not changed, I feel that the world around me has. When I was younger, many of my peers wanted to become scientists; it was the most admired occupation. But more recently, I have felt that the spotlight of the world has shifted toward finance. My peers told me that it was the only way to gain wealth and power. But isn't it necessary to take a step back and examine what built this world? Our basis has been, and always will be, on science. The world in the 21st century has never been more globalised; yet, so have its problems. Adversaries such as global warming and the possible energy crisis are affecting all of us. Without the creativities of zealous engineers who create materials that make our endeavours more efficient and safer for the environment, the we will find it hard to progress. Indeed, many of the problems to be solved by engineering are globalised. The need to project creative ideas over national borders links engineering with politics. In this respect, I have made strong preparations. I have attended Model United Nations conferences both in Vancouver and in New York City almost every year. From the MUN meetings, I have gained invaluable knowledge and expressed my own unique views on global issues. At school, I founded the Political Debate Club in grade 10, which brings together passionate members to prepare for the debates and discuss current events. Having a global view makes me more together with the world; this is also an advantage to my engineering potentials. I will undoubtedly be proud to be able to study and work towards my engineering career in an institution that welcomes and nurtures my intellects. However, one day, it will be my Alma Mater who is proud of me.
这是一篇在 UCAS 旧格式下撰写的成功陈述。自 2026 年入学起，个人陈述改为三个独立的回答。以下是一个范例——经济学——展示每个问题的优秀回答是什么样的：
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.
三个回答合计最多 4,000 字符，每个至少 350 字符。参见 UCAS 官方指南。