Applied Geophysics postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

A guest at my mother's bed and breakfast once told me, over breakfast, that he could find water with two bent coat hangers. He had walked our back field that morning and was certain an old spring ran beneath the vegetable beds. I did not argue, but I did know that the field had a clay drain laid by a previous owner, and that a few months earlier I had found it the slow way, with a resistivity meter, sixty electrodes and a very muddy weekend. What interested me afterwards was not whether he was wrong, but why my own answer deserved more trust than his. That question, about how we justify what we claim lies underground, is why I want to study applied geophysics at postgraduate level.

My undergraduate degree was in geology, and I came to geophysics sideways, through a second-year field course where we ran a short seismic refraction line across a valley floor. The arrivals on the screen were messy, and fitting a two-layer model to them by hand made me realise how much interpretation sits between a measurement and a picture of the subsurface. In my final year I chose a project that would let me spend longer in that gap. I used a Wenner array to survey a strip of the university farm where records suggested a field drain had been installed, collected several profiles at different electrode spacings, and inverted the data using open-source software. The drain appeared as a narrow resistive anomaly at roughly the expected depth, but so did a patch of gravelly fill I had not anticipated. Comparing the two with a hand auger and the farm manager's memory taught me to treat an inversion result as a hypothesis with a non-unique solution, not an answer. I also learned practical things: how badly a dry topsoil spoils contact resistance, and how much time careful field notes save at the desk.

Since graduating I have worked as a sampling technician for a regional water company. I collect groundwater samples from monitoring boreholes, record water levels and log field parameters such as conductivity and temperature. It is routine work, but it has given me a feel for how aquifers behave over seasons, and it is where I first saw a geophysical borehole log used to decide the depth of a new screen. I have since taught myself more Python, mainly to tidy and plot our level data, and I am working through Lowrie's Fundamentals of Geophysics to strengthen the potential field and seismic theory that my geology degree touched only briefly. I am aware that my mathematics needs to keep pace, so I have been revising linear algebra and Fourier methods in the evenings.

Outside work I coach a junior orienteering group on Sunday mornings. Teaching eleven-year-olds to read contour lines and relate a map to the ground in front of them is surprisingly close to the problem of reading a geophysical section, though I would not push the comparison too far. I also still help with the B&B on busy weekends, which mostly means cooking breakfasts and handling bookings, and has made me reliable at juggling several tasks to a deadline.

I would like a masters to give me a rigorous grounding in the physics and computation behind near-surface methods, particularly electrical and seismic imaging and the joint interpretation of different data sets. I am especially interested in hydrogeophysics, because my job has shown me how much groundwater management depends on knowing what lies between boreholes. I bring field experience, patience with imperfect data and a habit of checking results against the ground. I want to learn to do that checking with much greater confidence, so that the next time someone asks what is under the vegetable beds, I can explain not only my answer but how certain I am of it.