One Health postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My interest in One Health began not with a single case study but with a repeated observation during my undergraduate degree: the same problem kept reappearing in different modules under different names. Antimicrobial resistance was an infection control issue in one lecture, a livestock husbandry issue in another, and a wastewater chemistry problem in a third. Nobody taught them together, and it seemed obvious that they belonged together.

I graduated with a 2:1 in Environmental Biology. My final-year project examined the information community pharmacies gave the public about finishing courses of antibiotics. I designed a short structured observation and question schedule, visited fourteen pharmacies across two boroughs as a customer enquiring about a cough, and recorded what advice was offered unprompted. The findings were modest and I was careful not to overstate them, but the process taught me a great deal: how quickly a small sample limits what you can claim, how much ethical thought a seemingly simple design requires, and how differently the same guidance is communicated depending on staffing pressure and time of day. My supervisor pushed me to be honest about confounders rather than tidy the results, which was the most useful supervision I received.

I did not have access to research placements or funded fieldwork, so I built experience where I could. For the past two years I have volunteered with a river catchment group, taking monthly phosphate, nitrate and turbidity readings at three points along a small urban river using low-cost colorimetric kits. It is unglamorous work involving cold hands and waders, but it has grounded my understanding of surveillance. I have learned why replicate sampling matters, why our readings after heavy rain are almost uninterpretable without knowing storm overflow activity, and how much interpretation depends on metadata that volunteers are rarely asked to record. I now keep notes on rainfall, visible sewage debris and dog-walking intensity alongside the chemistry, because our downstream site sits beside a popular off-lead field and I became curious about faecal indicator sources. I am aware that curiosity is not evidence, and that is precisely why I want formal training in study design and epidemiological methods.

My paid work is as an assistant technician in a further education science department. I prepare practicals, manage stock and handle disposal of biological material, and I have taken responsibility for our COSHH paperwork and autoclave logs. It has made me unusually comfortable with the mundane infrastructure of safe science, and with explaining risk to sixteen-year-olds who would rather not wear goggles. Communicating across differences in knowledge and priority seems central to One Health practice, and this job has given me daily practice at it.

My reading has followed my questions. Ostrom's work on governing common-pool resources reshaped how I think about shared water and shared antimicrobials, both of which degrade through individually reasonable decisions. I have also followed reporting on the UK's antimicrobial resistance strategy and the tensions between agricultural, clinical and environmental stewardship.

From a master's I want quantitative epidemiology, zoonotic disease ecology, and enough policy and health systems grounding to understand why integrated surveillance is difficult in practice rather than only in theory. I would like a dissertation combining environmental sampling with human behaviour data, ideally in an urban catchment. In the longer term I hope to work in environmental public health or integrated surveillance within a public agency. I bring careful observation, patience with unspectacular data, and a habit of finishing things without much supervision.

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