Sussex: Why this course

Part of the shared 4,000-character total; minimum 350 characters

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

What it’s really asking

This question wants the genuine intellectual reason you chose this subject. Sussex is testing whether your motivation is specific and informed, or generic and interchangeable. The strongest answers point to a concrete spark (an idea, a problem, a tension in the field) and show you already think like a student of the subject.

Why they ask it

Sussex reads this first and uses it to judge whether you actually understand what the course involves. A vague 'I have always been passionate' tells them nothing; a precise hook tells them you have looked closely at the discipline and chosen it on purpose. It sets the tone for the whole statement.

Three ways in

Name the idea that pulls you in

State the exact idea, question, or problem in the subject that draws you, and why it is unresolved or interesting.

Find the moment it became a choice

Describe a moment where the subject stopped being a school subject and became something you chose to think about on your own.

Tie it to a real question

Connect the subject to how you want to understand or change something, kept analytical rather than sentimental.

✕ Weak opening

“From a young age I have always had a passion for psychology and helping people.”

✓ Strong opening

“I assumed memory was a recording until a study showed me how easily a confident witness can be wrong.”

✦ Annotated example · Economics applicant: why this course. Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →

When my town's only evening bus route was cut, I assumed the council had simply run out of money. Then I read that the route had been 'deregulated' decades earlier, and that the decision turned on whether an empty late bus counted as a public good or a private loss. That question reframed everything for me. ¹I want to study Economics because it gives me the tools to ask not just what a policy costs, but who bears the cost and why the incentives produced that outcome. Reading Tim Harford and then, more demandingly, Ha-Joon Chang's 'Economics: The User's Guide', I realised the discipline is less a single truth than a set of competing models, each illuminating part of the picture. ²Chang's insistence that there is no value-free economics unsettled the tidy supply-and-demand graphs I had learned, and I found that productive rather than discouraging. What draws me specifically to Sussex is the emphasis on development and behavioural economics within the department, and modules that treat institutions and history as central rather than optional. ³I am not looking for a course that simply confirms that markets clear; I want one that asks when they fail, and what we should do about the people left standing at the bus stop.

1A single short sentence acts as a pivot. It signals the move from a personal anecdote into analysis, which is exactly the 'analysis over description' that Sussex rewards.
2Names specific, contrasting reading and draws an intellectual conclusion from it. This is course-specific evidence, not a list of hobbies, which keeps the 80 percent subject focus.
3Connects motivation to the specific department's strengths, showing genuine fit and research rather than a generic 'why economics' answer.

Stuck? Start here

What is one idea or finding in this subject that genuinely changed how you see something?
If you had to defend why this subject matters in two sentences, what would you say without using the word passion?
What question in this field would you most like to be able to answer by the end of your degree?

Before you submit

Does the opening line contain a specific idea, not a generic claim of passion?
Have I shown what changed in my thinking, not just what I am interested in?
Would this answer make sense for any UK university, with no single campus named?

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