Writing personal statement for UCAS

Growing up my brother and I always argued about who would get to eat with The Spoon. The Spoon sat next to our most expensive china, despite being rusty and deformed. The Spoon was made over 60 years ago in the unbearable cold of a Soviet labour camp, by the bare hands of a then 19-year old young man who never got tired of later telling this anecdote to me, his granddaughter. The Spoon was never just a utensil. It represents both history and a silence, always making me wonder what was left unsaid about it. Its creation was just one of many stories that contributed to my interest in history and the role of power and politics in its production.As a result of my curiosity about the USSR and the Cold War, I wrote my IB Extended Essay on the Eisenhower Administration's influence on the success of the Sputnik programme. For this, I read A. Saddiqi's 'Korolev, Sputnik, and The International Geophysical Year', Brzezinski's 'Red Moon Rising', and also conducted research at the Open Society Archives through examining primary sources, mostly newspaper articles, to deepen my investigation. Overall, I found that many American officials highly disregarded the Soviet reports of an impending satellite launch and naively assumed that the Communist world could not overtake the West, which motivated the Sputnik team to prove them wrong. This presented a glimpse of the complicated relations during the Space Age and illustrated how this rivalry was a highly competitive alternative to war. While examining Hungary's journalistic discourse under Socialist rule, I also discovered a tendency to use Sputnik as a symbol of power to prove the overall superiority of Socialism over the West, which showed me an example of the undeniable influence of politics on writings that are essential for historiography.To broaden my understanding, I joined the Milestone Institute academic talent programme, where I took a Historiography module. The readings for the course, for instance Michel-Rolph Trouillot's 'Silencing the Past', demonstrated how archives and sources can provide a foundation for narratives that silence people's individual histories. Therefore, I decided to write an individual research project on how the cultural and political context of 19th century sources about London's poor has come to shape their depictions. After reading J. Marriott's 'The Other Empire' amongst other texts, I have found that the sources, such as novels of Dickens and urban travel accounts of Mayhew, were loaded with racial theories, coming to prevalence due to the colonisation of India, resulting in a biased depiction of London's poor.These experiences inspired my interest in the effects of power, thus I took up politics classes at Milestone, which introduced me to fundamental concepts, such as taxation, voting and checks and balances. My favourite reading was Lipset's 'Some Social Requisites of Democracy', in which he connects economic growth and development to the creation of democracy. Although the statistics I encountered in Przeworski and Limongi's article 'Modernization: Theories and Facts' do not entirely support the theory, I concluded that people who are given the option of educational development tend to be more eager to use their voices. As I wished to witness this myself, I volunteered to teach rhetorics to inmates at a prison, after completing the Speak Academy foundation's public speaking course. Experiencing how the prisoners opened up while delivering speeches, I sensed that I was helping them narrate their own histories and realised how they were silenced thus far in the political institution of the prison.Outside of my academic interests I always searched for new challenges, such as becoming the drummer of a rock band and the goalie of a girls' football team. I now wish to test my skills in the first-rate educational environment of the UK, as I believe that its academically challenging atmosphere would enable me to carry on my grandfather's legacy.