Epidemiology postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My interest in epidemiology grew out of a fairly small frustration during my biomedical science degree. I enjoyed the laboratory modules, but I kept wanting to know how many people a given mechanism actually affected, and why some communities appeared in the figures more often than others. The population-level questions were the ones I thought about on the bus home, so I began steering my optional modules towards public health and statistics, and eventually chose a data-based final-year project rather than bench work.

That project involved comparing influenza-like illness reporting between two English regions using publicly available surveillance and demographic data. It was a modest piece of work, and the most useful thing I took from it was an appreciation of how much care goes into the questions before any analysis. My initial plan assumed the two regions' data were directly comparable; my supervisor pushed me to look at how case definitions and reporting practices differed, and much of my write-up ended up discussing those limitations honestly rather than presenting a tidy difference. I learned to use R properly for the analysis, mostly by working through documentation and a free online textbook in the evenings, and I now find data cleaning oddly satisfying. I graduated with a 2:1 and my highest marks were in epidemiology and medical statistics.

Since graduating I have worked as a data administrator for a trust providing community health services. My role is administrative rather than analytical: I maintain referral and appointment records, chase missing entries and prepare routine activity reports for service managers. It has been an unglamorous but genuinely useful education. I have seen how a single ambiguous field on a form produces months of unreliable data, how much recorded information depends on how busy a clinic was that afternoon, and how easily a summary figure can be quoted without anyone checking what it counts. When I read epidemiological papers now, I pay much closer attention to how the exposure and outcome were actually captured. I also worked with a colleague on one small improvement: we rewrote the guidance notes staff used when entering referral reasons, after noticing that a large share were being logged under a catch-all category. It took several weeks of asking people what they found confusing, and the proportion of vague entries fell noticeably in the following quarter. It was a narrow change, but it was mine and my colleague's, and it made later reporting less guesswork.

Outside work I help organise a weekly walking group with about twenty regular members, which mainly involves planning routes and making sure newer walkers are not left behind. I have also been keeping a personal project using open air-quality monitoring data alongside published hospital admission counts for respiratory conditions in my area. I am aware it cannot support any causal claim, and confounding by season and deprivation is obvious even to me, but working out why my early plots were misleading has taught me more about study design than any single module did.

I would like formal training in study design, causal inference and longitudinal methods, and more experience with larger routinely collected datasets. My longer-term aim is to work as an analyst in a public health team, where the questions are practical and the data are imperfect. Studying epidemiology properly seems the right way to make myself useful there.

Review this personal statement

Latest reviews