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Why do you want to study this course or subject?

From a young age I have always been fascinated by how the world works. My interest in economics became specific in Year 11, when my father's building firm lost two contracts in a single month and blamed interest rates. I could not see the connection, so I traced it: the Bank of England raises the base rate, lenders reprice mortgages, monthly repayments rise, and the family in Croydon who were going to build a side extension decide to wait a year. Four steps, all of them observable, and a headline turned into a mechanism.

What holds my interest now is where the mechanism stops working. My textbook treats rational agents as settled, but Ha-Joon Chang's 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism made me suspicious of how much is smuggled into that assumption, and Kahneman's account of loss aversion explained my father's behaviour better than any model I had been taught: he held on to an underpriced job for months rather than accept the loss of walking away. I want to study economics because it is the discipline that insists on testing which explanation survives contact with data, rather than settling for the one that tells the better story.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare for this course or subject?

Maths is the subject that has changed how I read economics. Differentiation stopped being an exercise once I understood that marginal cost is the derivative of total cost, and that the profit-maximising condition my Economics class asks me to memorise is simply the first-order condition. Working through elasticity calculations properly also taught me to be careful with claims about tax incidence: whether a duty falls on the producer or the consumer is not a political question but a matter of relative elasticities, and the answer changes with the time horizon.

History has been the more surprising influence. My coursework on the 1970s asked why the Phillips curve relationship broke down, and following the argument from the oil shocks through to expectations-augmented models showed me that economic theory gets revised by events rather than by pure reasoning. Studying the collapse of Bretton Woods alongside it gave me a sense of how fragile institutional arrangements are, which is not something the syllabus conveys on its own.

For my EPQ I asked whether the 2016 introduction of the National Living Wage reduced employment in UK retail. Finding that the empirical literature disagreed with the competitive labour market model I had just been taught was uncomfortable, and monopsony was the first idea I have accepted because the evidence pointed there rather than because I was told to.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

I work Saturdays on the checkouts at a Co-op, which has given me a small but useful window into pricing. I noticed that reduced-to-clear stickers go on at a fixed time rather than in response to how much stock is actually left, so I spent three weeks recording what was still on the shelf at closing. I put the numbers into a spreadsheet, taught myself enough Python to run a simple regression, and found that the waste was concentrated in two product lines. My manager passed the note upward. Nothing came of it, but it was the first time I had gathered my own data instead of being handed a dataset.

I have also completed the LSE summer challenge, attended a series of online lectures from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, read the Economist most weeks, entered the Marshall Society essay competition, and helped run the school's Young Enterprise team as finance director. I am currently working through the opening chapters of Varian's Intermediate Microeconomics to see how much further the maths goes than A-level takes it.

Captaining the school's badminton second team has taught me discipline and time management. I believe these qualities, along with my genuine passion for the subject, would make me an asset to your university.